Development Economics: What are the main causes of poverty?

Essay by vanna88High School, 12th gradeA-, November 2005

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Poverty is basically the condition of having insufficient resources or income. It is the state of being where one is deprived of necessities in life such as housing, food, sufficient income, employment and access to required social services and status. There are many forms of poverty which exists in this world such as absolute poverty, relative poverty, human poverty and lastly income poverty. Absolute poverty is defined as living to an absolute minimum standard which is called the 'poverty line' where people barely have sufficient resources to live. Relative poverty is when people are poor in relation to people around them in the country. Income poverty is when people are poor when they have less money than the defined poverty line in their country and lastly human poverty takes account other factors such as life expectancy, infant mortality, nutrition, illiteracy and lack of food and clean water and lack of health services.

Poverty exists in both MEDC's and LEDC's, however, absolute poverty and the places which suffer poverty severely and the most is in LEDC's such as Africa, Asia, Latin America and some countries in Eastern Europe. People in these countries, struggle daily for food, shelter and other necessities. They also often suffer from severe malnutrition, epidemic disease outbreaks, famine and war. However, poverty in MEDC's is usually due to poor nutrition, mental illness, drug dependence, crime and high rates of disease. There are many reasons and causes to poverty which some people say it is due to adequate lack of resources on a global level such as land, food , shelter, building materials in order to survive while other believe it is because of uneven distribution of resources around the world. Overall, there are many causes to poverty which is caused from political, social and...