Highly Employed Poor Peoples

Note: Taken information from wikipedia...

With the recent economic slowdown some of the new's that keeps coming often is how lots of peoples are loosing their jobs and unemployment rates are in the rise. I was curious to know the unemployment situation of the world and did a small search. I came out with the following chart which is a compilation of the world unemployment rate from CIA figures.

World rate of unemployment

Now I was surprised to see that India is comparable to most of the developed nations in terms of employment. Even surprising was we were better then the United States. We have an unemployment rate of ~ 7.5% as compared to 10.2% in the USA. Well that's like doing really good. But the hard fact is we are still a long way to go to provide proper employment, and also proper healthcare and food. I was now more interested to know how do we fare in poverty. So I went ahead and checked the poverty statistics. The first chart I checked was that of people below the poverty line as defined by the respective countries. Now we start showing up being not so good. We are just better then the African nations and comparable to the developed nations. The developed nations fared really well in uplifting their peoples above the poverty line. China surprisingly did a really good job, partly because their poverty line must be really on the lower side.

% population below national poverty line

A better way to compare countries is to put them in the same scale. So when I looked into such data I found one which gives the % of population living below $1.25/day. And the statistics revealed the status of our population. 40 - 60% of our population falls in that category. Our neighbors line China, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and developing nations like Brazil did much better with 6-20% of their population being in that category. There is a lesson to learn, we India has a long way to go. Though comparing at a single level of currency is not a proper way to look at things and we need to look into purchasing power parity, this still gives us an indication that we are a "Highly Employed Poor Nation"

% population living below $1.25/day