Global Health Watch 1 in one file

2 ‘I became sick because of my poverty.’ ‘Well, I became poor because of
my sickness.’ The two-way relationship between poverty and ill-health
affects billions.
Consider, first, the impact of globalization on poverty, one of the most
powerful predictors of poor health. It is claimed that globalization has reduced
the number of people living in abject poverty (defined by the World Bank as
living on less than a dollar a day) by 200 million since 1980 (Dollar 2002). This
still leaves 1.2 billion people living on less than a dollar a day, and 2.8 billion,
almost half the world’s population, on less than two dollars a day (Chen
and Ravallion 2004). Critics point to flaws in how the Bank measures poverty
(Wade 2002), and raise questions about the validity of the purchasing power
parity estimates used to measure cost of living differentials between countries
(Reddy and Pogge 2003); use of questionable historical data (Wade 2004); the
irrelevance of the dollar a day threshold to the realities of life in the developing
world’s fast-growing cities (Satterthwaite 2003); and lack of reliable data from
China and India where almost all the poverty reduction has taken place (Wade
2002). All these factors mean that official figures on the extent of world poverty
are likely to be under-estimates (Reddy and Pogge 2003). In India, for example,
new research is finding that poverty and rural hunger probably increased during
the 1990s (Patnaik 2004).
Even if recent growth in China and India has reduced the number of their
Health for all in a ‘borderless world’?
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