Essay On Extreme Poverty And Inequality

Defining extreme poverty and inequality

Economically speaking, income poverty can be described when a family’s income fails below to some pre established threshold. Usually, it is measured with regard to families and adjusted for the number of persons in it, never taking into account the individual itself. It may be different depending on the country. On international levels, a person is seen as being extreme poor if lives with less than 1$ per day.

Poverty can also be defined into absolute or relative terms. The first concept has to be with the income necessary to meet basic needs, like food, clothing and shelter. On the other hand, the second concept takes into account the social and cultural aspect of someone’s life, defining poor as the failure to meet some pre-established standards of living in a certain societal context.

In the 21st century it is incomprehensible the increasing number of persons that, across all European countries, find themselves living in poverty and being victims of social exclusion. In fact, recent data shows that in 2015 there are 123 million of European citizens that are at risk of poverty or social exclusion and 50 million people living in a serious income deficiency. How can this be acceptable in a so proclaimed democratic and socially aware of their citizens Europe?

In the view of Isabel Ortiz, director of Social Protection at the United Nations International Labor Organization (ILO), on the article “A Europe for the many, not the few”, released by Oxfam, in September of 2015, “Poverty in the EU is not an issue of scarcity during the crisis, but a problem of how wealth is distributed”.

In fact, it is not a new that there has always been a redistribution problem, promoting, in the most of the times, the welfare of a dominant minority, accentuating the gap between rich and poor along the years, which ended up by leaving to an increase of poverty levels among European