According to Chief Economist at Goldman Sachs Jim O’Neill, (FT, 16 Jul 08, p. 11), “poverty is dropping dramatically around the world.”
He says the number of people living on $2.75 dollars per day or less dropped from 50 percent of the world’s population in the 1970s to 17 percent in 2000. (This kind of ignores what you could buy with 2.75 dollars then and in 2000, let alone now.)
“Probably no more than 5 percent of the world’s population now suffers this indignity” [of having to live on one dollar per day or less].
(But if the current world population is 6.5bn, that’s 325 million people).
Nigerian oil theft
And on p. 8 there’s an interesting story about the illegal theft of up to half a million barrels of oil a day from the Niger Delta (Nigeria). “One of the fastest growing criminal rackets in the world [is] the industrial-scale theft of crude oil [in Nigeria].”
It quoted Patrick Dele Cole, a former aide of Obasanjo, as saying: “In exchange for the oil there are now arms coming in, and in exchange for these arms insurrection is being fuelled; and so you have a vicious cycle.”
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