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The Wretched Dollar (up to $1 a day)

Map No. 179

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The first Millennium Development Goal is to halve, between 1990 and 2015, the proportion of people who live on the equivalent of US$1 a day, or less. In 2002, an estimated 17% of the world population lived on this amount. They lived on less than or equal to what, to be precise, US$1.08 would have bought in the United States in 1993.

In over twenty territories more than a third of the population lives on less than US$1 a day. All but two of these territories are in Africa.

The largest population living on US$1 a day is in Southern Asia, most of whom live in India.

"The mass of the people struggle against the same poverty, flounder about making the same gestures ... It is an underdeveloped world, a world inhuman in its poverty ..." Franz Fanon, 1961

Territory size shows the proportion of all people living on less than or equal to US$1 in purchasing power parity a day.

• Open PDF poster, designed for printing. You need Acrobat Reader.
• View labelled territory map or population map for comparison
• Data files: Excel (large with map), Excel (small no map), Opendoc format (see notes)
• Technical notes for this data.
• High Resolution image (see copyright conditions)
• All of the data we use is estimated; see data page