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[...] If a poor country's income goes up from $5,000 to $5,500 (a 10 per cent increase), and a rich country's income goes up from $50,000 to $54,500 (a per cent increase), the Gini index will show decreasing inequality because the income of the poor country is growing faster than that of the rich…

[...] Sudhir Anand and Paul Segal show that if we take China out of the Gini figures, we see that global inequality has been increasing, not decreasing--up from 50 in 1988 to 58 in 2005. This is important, because--once again--China and East Asia are some of the only places where structural adjustm…

There is a strong consensus among scholars that the $1.25 line is far too low, but it remains in official use because it is the only line that shows any progress against poverty--at least when you include China--and therefore is the only line that justifies the present economic order.

a trenchant indictment of our global economic system

[...] global poverty headcount increased during the 1980s and 1990s, while the World Bank was imposing structural adjustment across most of the global South. Today, the extreme poverty headcount is exactly the same as it was in 1981, at just over 1 billion people. In other words, while the good-n…