2023-07-14 04:42:45
According to a UN report, 165 million people worldwide have slipped below the poverty line in recent years. Because of the Covid pandemic and the subsequent economic upheaval since 2020, the daily money available to those affected has fallen below the threshold of $3.65 (regarding €3.26), the UN development agency UNDP announced on Friday. A total of a good 1.65 billion people live below this limit.
“This number might 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.
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.
The United Nations had already warned on Wednesday that 52 countries around the world were sitting in a debt trap that they might 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.
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