Where are the World's Poor People Located

Source: Where do the World's Poor Live? A New Update

A new report from the Institute of Development Studies has provided this information on where the poor lived in 2008, according to two standards -- those who lived on less than $1.25 a day (1.2 billion people) and the larger number of those who lived on less than $2.00 day (2.4 billion people).

The countries in shaded rows in the table were classified by the World Bank as low income countries in 1990 and as lower middle-income countries in 2012. The Philippines are and have been classified by the World Bank as a lower middle-income country. Brazil is and has been classified as an upper middle-income country.

There are a couple of things to note here.

• Ten percent of the world's countries contain nearly nine-tenths of the world's poorest people. 
• Most of these countries have sufficiently high GDPs to significantly help their own poor if they choose policies to do so.
• Roughly half of the world's poorest people live in China and India.

The report also mentions that 18.4 per cent of world poverty is concentrated in fragile low income states such as the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). These fragile, low income states present a serious problem for donor agencies seeking to combat the worst aspects of poverty.