Poor and Developing Environment

Abstract

Poverty and underdevelopment in the world today manifest themselves as a multidimensional phenomenon that strikes victims of malnutrition, privation, exclusion, diseases, and other avoidable evils. Poverty and underdevelopment also considerably reduce poor people’s life expectancy and harden their quality of living. Although the percentage of poor people is steadily declining, as of the year 2016 it was estimated that as much as 10% of the world’s population was living in serious poverty. Concerned with the misery and underdevelopment of the world, the crafters of Bretton Woods established in 1944 multilateral financial institutions and later initiated the development assistance movement (DAM) with the sole objective of fighting poverty and exclusion and promoting economic development. They were aiming for global shared well-being, particularly with countries and territories considered in unbearable insufficiencies. This original solidarity momentum was recently confirmed by the United Nations (UN) in their 2015 report on the Millennium Development Goals (MDG), which set itself the objective of ending all forms of poverty by the dawn of 2030, but which was also seriously questioned by opponents. “The most pressing economic problem of our time is that so many of what we usually call ‘developing economies’ are, in fact, not developing” (Friedman 2002).