The BNPL data indicates that the story of global poverty over the past few decades is more complex – and more troubling – than we previously understood. There are three major findings.
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First, progress is slower than we thought. Between 1980 and 2011, global extreme poverty declined by only six percentage points, from 23% to 17%. During the same period, the number of people in extreme poverty actually increased, from 1.01 billion to 1.20 billion.
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Second, poverty alleviation has not been steady. In the 1990s the poverty rate increased dramatically, during the period when neoliberal structural adjustment programmes were imposed on many developing countries.
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Third, while we don't yet have robust BNPL data after 2011, we know that food insecurity has increased steadily in more recent years, going from 21% in 2014 to 30% in 2022.
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Given that secure access to food is central to the BNPL method, this suggests that post-2011 poverty trends have probably not improved much.
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This bears repeating: despite the massive productivity of the world economy, nearly one-third of the human population does not have secure access to food.
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Extreme poverty is a condition of severe humanitarian crisis. It is not a natural condition, and should not exist. It occurs because, in our current economic system, most of our production is organized around what is most profitable to capital, rather than what is most necessary for people.
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This suffering can be eliminated very simply by organizing production - our labour and our resources - first and foremost around human needs and well-being, using basic policies like public provisioning and price controls to ensure universal access to essential goods.
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