UN disclosures
Corona, Ukraine war, inflation: Since 2020, another 165 million people have slipped into poverty
A girl in India asks for alms
© Rafiq Maqbool/AP/DPA
More than 1.6 billion people worldwide live below the poverty line. In recent years, 165 million have been added. They have to get by on less than four US dollars a day.
According to a UN report, 165 million people worldwide have slipped below the poverty line since 2020. The reason given by the UN on Thursday was the Corona pandemic, the effects of the war in Ukraine and the high cost of living.
In the past three years, the daily available money for those affected has fallen below the threshold of 3.65 dollars (about 3.26 euros), the UN development agency UNDP announced on Friday. According to the study, by the end of this year, 75 million people will fall into extreme poverty, surviving on less than $2.15 a day. A total of a good 1.65 billion people live below this limit.
“This number could have been even higher if governments had not launched social programs and economic stimulus packages during the Corona crisis,” said UNDP chief Achim Steiner, the highest-ranking German representative at the United Nations. For poor countries in particular, however, this burden is often unsustainable.
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This has far-reaching social consequences: “A government that can no longer employ doctors and nurses in hospitals, that cannot provide medicines for rural health centers, is essentially undermining the country’s social infrastructure,” Steiner continued. This means less medical help, less education and no social safety nets to relieve people when they can no longer support their families. Countries that have been able to invest in safety nets in the past three years, however, have prevented many people from sliding into poverty .
The United Nations had already warned on Wednesday that 52 countries around the world were sitting in a debt trap that they could hardly overcome without help. Global public debt rose to a record $92 trillion in 2022. That is five times as much as in 2000. Poor countries account for a disproportionately high share. A good 40 percent of the world’s population, 3.3 billion people, live in countries where interest payments on loans exceed spending on health or education, it says.