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Just to calculate this poverty thing

The average monthly income of each household was Tk19,425 in March which came down to Tk15,492 in August, the Perception Survey on Livelihood 2020 found.

That’s for Bangladesh. There are ¬ 100 Tk to the £ and the PPP factor – to take account of different living costs – is about 0.4. So, average household, household mind, income of £375 per month. For the UK it’s about £2,500 per month.

Someone on dole alone, an individual on dole alone*, is on more than Bangladeshi average household income.

now then, let’s talk about poverty in the UK shall we?

*Well, nearly.

15 thoughts on “Just to calculate this poverty thing”

  1. Yep. But they are poorer than everyone else, whereas Me Average Bangladesh isn’t. And people care about that more, as long as they aren’t starving

  2. “….to take account of different living costs – is about 0.4. So, average household, household mind, income of £375 per month. For the UK it’s about £2,500 per month….”

    And therein lies the fundamental reason for economic migration. Assuming that migrants are going to be of above average in strength and initiative, they could expect to make around 10 times* their stay-at-home wages.

    *In the UK you will lose about 1/5 of your income in direct taxes. In Bangladesh, you appear to start paying tax at 250,000 Tk.

  3. PPP is a crude measure, some things are likely much cheaper in Bangladesh, other things astonishingly expensive. I suppose that many food staples, such as sugar (when I was in India it seemed to run on sugar) are cheaper than the PPP ratio.
    OTOH, if they want a barrel of oil, I guess they are going to have to pay the (not PPP adjusted) world price for it, which makes them look very poor indeed.

  4. Yeah all right, you had Kolehmainen, Nurmi, Ritola and Viren. But the greatest save in the history of football was at Wembley (United Kingdom) from a cross by Jamie Redknapp (also from the United Kingdom, a country so secure in itself it doesn’t even have a national football team).

  5. I have a genuine query with these calculations of poverty, how do they treat assets? If you own your own home, for example, even if it is a shack that saves you possibly your main expense reducing the income you need to avoid poverty.

    Related to this current unemployment benefit is £73.10 / week is potentially dwarfed by the level of housing benefit you can receive, up to £350 / week for a single person, am I right this counts as income but if you own your own home there is no implied benefit / income.

    Similarly access to in the UK to the NHS count as income. Thats worth more than the poverty measures but you cant eat / live on that income

  6. “PPP is a crude measure, some things are likely much cheaper in Bangladesh, other things astonishingly expensive. I suppose that many food staples, such as sugar (when I was in India it seemed to run on sugar) are cheaper than the PPP ratio.”

    Bangladesh I don’t know. But I do have considerable knowledge of Colombia, Brasil etc. Locally sourced goods & services can be considerably cheaper than say Europe. And housing & rents. But anything exposed to world markets is going to tend to be the same price. And that’s before you might have to take local import taxes into or sales taxes into consideration. And very often there isn’t the sort of competition or economies of scale to keep prices down. So in a small local store in a poor Colombian town a 1kg bag of rice can be a relatively expensive product. The same applies to things like electrical goods, clothing etc. It ain’t cheap being poor.

  7. From what I can determine, Bangladesh has a lower Gini coefficient than the UK, and therefore less poverty.

    According to the Left, it would be morally wrong to concern ourselves with the poor in such Third World countries when clearly there is a more urgent problem in Britain.

  8. It’s complicated. When we talk about that absolute poverty, the $1.90 a day, then it includes housing. Because it’s a measure of consumption. The other measures. It will include the HB in the English calculation but the equivalent (Section 8) is not included in the American system. And the provision of seviecs – NHS, libraries, education – is not included anywhere.

  9. First of all we need to have an agreement on the meaning of “poverty” – is it a lack of wealth or a low current income? BIG difference.
    Those with ample wealth can afford to play cricket as a “Gentleman” all summer. Someone with a low income who spends less than he earns can gradually accumulate wealth (e.g. Michael Marks) whereas hundreds of thousands of well-paid young women have declared themselves insolvent since 1997.
    The Grauniad always seems to switch the definition between successive sentences so that it can demand sympathy for the prodigal daughter who instead of recognising her folly and repenting of her habit of spending money she has not earned demands a bail-out from her frugal contemporaries.

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