'Poverty kills'

Raising incomes of the world's poorest is about more than raising living standards. Poverty kills. This column discusses recent research illustrating the links between extreme poverty and early death.

There are more than billion people getting by on less than a dollar a day in the world. How much better would they be if their incomes rose to, say, $2 a day? The sensible answer -- sitting in a country with an average income of $160 per day – would seem to be $1 per day better off, but this ignores many intangibles that come with extreme poverty – things that don't make it into national income accounts. Many, perhaps most, of these intangibles are unmeasurable, but not all. Recent research by Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo has shed some light on one that is very easy to understand and measurable – premature death.

In the world's poorest countries, poor people die early, as Table 1 illustrates for the case of Indonesia. The numbers are shocking. For the best off in the survey sample – those in households whose daily household expenditure per capita valued at purchasing power parity is between four and six dollars a day – the numbers show that of the over-50s that entered the survey in 1993, 7% were dead four years later and 18% seven years later. For those living in the poorest households, the figures were much higher: 15% and 22% respectively...

~ From Aging and death on a dollar a day ~