World Poverty and Human Rights
By Thomas Pogge
Despite a high and growing global average income, billions of human beings are still condemned to life-long severe poverty, with all its attendant evils of low life expectancy, social exclusion, ill health, illiteracy, dependency, and effective enslavement. The annual death toll from poverty- related causes is around 18 million, or one-third of all human deaths, which adds up to approximately 270 million deaths since the end of the Cold War.
This problem is hardly unsolvable, in spite of its magnitude. Though constituting 44% of the world’s population, the 2,735 million people the World Bank counts as below its more generous $2 per day international poverty line consume only 1.3% of the global product, and would need just 1% more to escape poverty so defined.
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