1 Sep
2005

















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     global divides

The US Population Reference Bureau (PRB), a population information clearing house, has released its latest World Population Data Sheet (PDF).

The Sheet provides statistics about population sizes, life expectancy, fertility rates, infant mortality, energy use and income levels that are of value in understanding various digital divides discussed on the Caslon Analytics site.

PRB comments that over 50% of the global population lives below the internationally defined poverty line of less than US$2 per day, including 97% in Uganda, 80% in Nicaragua, 66% in Pakistan and 47% in China.

Differences in purchasing power between countries and between different locations within individual countries mean that caution is desirable in interpreting such figures. Low per capita income does not necessarily equal starvation, there is considerable variation in economic growth rates and in access to services.

However, the PRB compilation is a useful reminder that over a third of the world's rural residents lack ongoing access to safe drinking water, that Africa's infant mortality rate is around 15 times that of the developed world (which uses over five times the energy per capita used by the 'South') and that the life expectancy at birth in much of Africa is around 60% of that in Australia and Japan.

The World Bank has meanwhile released a range of pertinent papers that include Martin Ravallion's Inequality is bad for the poor (here), Public infrastructure and private investment in the Middle East and North Africa (here) by Pierre-Richard Agenor, Mustapha Nabli & Tarik Yousef, and Growth spillover effects and regional development patterns : the case of Chinese provinces (here) by Xubei Luo.




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