Global Poverty and the New Bottom Billion: What if Three‐quarters of the World's Poor Live in Middle‐income Countries?
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Summary This paper argues that the global poverty problem has changed because most of the world's poor no longer live in low income countries (LICs). Previously, poverty was viewed as an LIC issue predominantly; nowadays such simplistic assumptions/classifications are misleading because some large countries that graduated into the MIC category still have large numbers of poor people. In 1990, we estimate 93 per cent of the world's poor lived in LICs; contrastingly in 2007–8 three quarters of the world's poor approximately 1.3bn lived in middle‐income countries (MICs) and about a quarter of the world's poor, approximately 370mn people live in the remaining 39 low‐income countries – largely in sub‐Saharan Africa. This startling change over two decades implies a new ‘bottom billion’ who do not live in fragile and conflict‐affected states, but in stable, middle‐income countries. Such global patterns are evident across monetary, nutritional and multi‐dimensional poverty measures. This paper argues the general pattern is robust enough to warrant further investigation and discussion.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it