The Peculiarities of Poverty Research in the Countries of the World

Abstract

The article attempts to generalize some features of the study of poverty in the modern world. The use of various indicators that demonstrate the level of poverty has been shown. It has been explained that GDP per capita is one of the most accurate ways of assessing the economic development of the state. It has been demonstrated that all the poorest countries are located on the African continent. Almost all of them used to be colonies of European empires, and now they face political instability, civil wars, natural disasters, etc. These problems have been considered on the examples of Niger and Egypt. Another indicator of poverty is the percentage of people living below the poverty line. The difficulty of using this indicator is that national poverty lines in different countries can differ significantly. According to this indicator, 8 African and 2 Latin American countries (Guatemala and Haiti) are in the top ten. The Global Hunger Index (GHI) has been considered, according to which African countries and Syria are among the top ten starving countries. It should be noted that for some countries there is very little data on the number and share of the hungry. When studying the situation in some countries (North Korea, Turkmenistan, Somalia, etc.), it should be borne in mind that the governments of these countries do not always publish real official statistics, and those data that get into the mass media are not always true. It has been proven that the Human Development Index (HDI) is an integrated indicator that can be used to study the problem of poverty. It has been shown that 10 countries with the lowest HDI are located in Africa. Their place in this ranking is influenced not only by material factors, but also by the average life expectancy and education. Africa is still a continent with a large number of illiterate people. The Corruption Perceptions Index is also important for the study of poverty, because corruption slows down reforms and harms transparent market relations. Therefore, it becomes one of the factors of poverty. Using the statistics provided by Transparency International, we have found out that the most corrupt countries are more evenly distributed around the globe, among them are not only African ones, but also Asian and Latin American states. It can be summarized that the nature of poverty is different in the developed and developing countries. In the developing countries, natural conditions, peculiarities of the organization of socioeconomic life, the political system and even the personality of political leaders are important. In the developed countries, poverty is mostly a consequence of individual psychological characteristics, behaviour, specific life circumstances, etc. In these countries, poverty can be easily overcome.