23 Feb Why give aid to middle-income countries?
Posted at 15:53h
in News
PovertyMatters Blog, Guardian.co.uk
Over the past few years a large number of once-poor countries have reached middle-income country (MIC) status, set by the World Bank at $1,000 per person per year. The global poverty problem has changed: most of the world’s poor no longer live in poor countries.
In fact there’s a new bottom billion – 960 million poor people, or 72% of the world’s poor – and they live not in poor countries but in middle-income countries, and most of them in stable states. Only a quarter of the world’s poor live in the remaining low-income countries (LICs), which are largely in sub-Saharan Africa. This is a dramatic change from just two decades ago when 93% of poor people lived in low-income countries.