Statistics on Poverty

There are many places where a person can go to find out information about important issues. Since there are so many places where one can obtain information about any possible topic that they would like to know about, sometimes it is hard to tell what sources are reliable and what sources are not. In most cases a person will need to rely on multiple sources to find valid information. This is especially true when one is dealing with statistics. A person can find statistics on just about anything. However, this does not mean that each statistic that is published it true, even if the source does seem reliable. Since this is true, it is important for a person to rely on multiple sources to compare statistics and analyze to the best of their ability which statistics they believe are true. In this paper statistics involving poverty will be looked at and because there are many contradicting statistics about poverty it is important that more then one source is used to find out which statistics are valid.

In “Inequality in the Global Village” Jan Knippers Black writes about statistics that he has found that are related to poverty. One statistic that he reported was that in 1997 poverty had fallen more in the past fifty years than it had in the previous five hundred years (2006). At first this statistic seemed to be accurate and believable because there were no other statistics that proved it wrong. However, later in the article Black writes about other statistics that he has found. He writes that in the 1980’s the world GPA growth rates dropped from 4.2 percent to 1.0 percent. Also, he writes about plummeting commodity prices and how countries were not able to pay off their debts to the World Bank because the economy was declining (2006). Since the economy declined in the 1980’s, people’s wages decreased and there was an increase in the amount of people who were unemployed. If the later of the two statistics is true then how can poverty possibly be improving? In order to best find out which statistic is true, further investigation from an outside source is needed to prove validity.

According to the Global Issues Website, there has been a decrease in economic activity and an increase in poverty in the past 20 years when compared to the previous 20 years prior to 1980. These statistics are based on five general areas which include: growth, life expectancy, infant and child mortality rate, education, and literacy (2006). This website concludes that the fall in economic growth rates is the most pronounced and applies to all people and all countries. Also, progress in life expectancy was reduced in 4 out of 5 groups of countries and progress reducing infant mortality rate has been significantly slower in the past 20 years. Their statistics also say that education and literacy has steadily declined (2006). According to the findings from this web page, one could probably conclude that poverty is in fact not decreasing but rather increasing. However, these statistics could be very misleading because they only produce information gathered from the past 40 years and not the past 500 years.

It is not impossible to say that both statistics that were mentioned by Black were wrong. However, the way that one interprets each statistic may differ and because of this, some people may interpret the first statistic as meaning that poverty levels are at a steady decrease and some people may interpret the second statistic as meaning that poverty levels are at an increase. A plausible explanation that