Poverty And Inequality In China

2004 Words9 Pages

Introduction

The world’s population is severely hit by poverty. Poverty is the general dearth. It is a state of an individual where he or she lacks the sufficient amount of material possessions or wealth. Apart from that, poverty involves more than the lack of income and personal possessions. It includes hunger, malnutrition, limited access to education, clean and safe supply of water and many more basic services. Here are a few depressing facts: Almost half the world live on less than $2.50 a day,
Nearly a billion people entered the 21st century being unable to read a book,
The total GDP of the 41 heavily indebted poor countries is less than the wealth of the world’s 7 richest people combined,1 billion children suffer poverty(1 in 2 children …show more content…

Half the world is living on less than $2.50 a day. Taking China as an example, it is the fourth largest country in the world having a population of more than 1.3 billion people. No doubt, China has been developing an at immense rate. However, the huge amount of population has also caused the poverty and inequality gap to rise. The citizens living in the rural area are far behind the ones living in the urban areas like Shanghai and Beijing. Large income inequalities have been created. Since 1978, the income of the urban have increased drastically, causing the large differential gap between the urban and rural. Reports have shown that although the average affluence per Chinese citizen was $17,126. Close to a double that of other high growth economies such as India. However, their median wealth was merely $6,327. This indicates that the population in the rural area has a relatively low amount of affluence. Also, another report showed that rural households in China have been spending almost 50% of their income on food. On the other hand, urban households in cities such as Beijing and Shanghai are only spending less than 30% on food. This has reflected the vast inequality and poverty gap between cities and the rural …show more content…

It is defined as having an immensely large amount of population in a country. Using Bangladesh as an example, it has one of the world’s highest population density with 1,147 persons per square kilometer. A large proportion of the workforce in Bangladesh is concentrated in a low-productivity manual farming which contributes to the lack of food production in the country and ends up contributing to the extreme level of poverty. Apart from overpopulation, changes in labor markets are also a cause of poverty. The number of better-paying jobs are declining while the demand for job opportunities are increasing significantly. Teenagers that studied in rural areas will have difficulties to find jobs due to the replacement of jobs with manual labors with service and technology jobs. The income gap between rural and urban citizens are also at an enormous rate. The larger the amount of population, the harder it is to tackle

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