9 - Poverty

In stark contrast to the images promoted by the tourism industry, the images and concepts the popular media associate with the term Third World are generally bleak: poverty, political instability, and natural disasters.

Probably the first thing that comes to most people’s minds when they think of developing countries is poverty. And clearly communities like Maquiteria in the Dominican Republic are poor. But poverty and wealth are always relative. Conditions in Maquiteria might actually look pretty good to people who live across the border in the neighbouring country of Haiti.

Nations are rich or poor for pretty much the same reason people are. It basically depends upon how much money they generate. This can be measured by what is called the Per Capita Gross National Product of a nation. That is a figure which is calculated by dividing the annual wealth generated by a country by its population. What the number doesn’t describe is how that wealth is distributed. So there can be countries in which, although there is a fairly high Per Capita GNP, the majority of the population remains poor because the nation’s wealth is concentrated in the hands of a few (some Middle Eastern nations might be examples of this). Still, as a rough way of measuring the comparative wealth of nations, Per Capita GNP is a useful tool.

Canada’s per capita gross national product for the year 2002, for example, was calculated at around $32,546 (US) dollars, which makes it one of the world’s stronger economies. It is less than Japan (at $38,984) but better than New Zealand ($25,942). The per capita gross national product of the Dominican Republic, on the other hand, is only a fraction of Canada’s, at $2,370.

But the per capita gross national product of Haiti was only $455. And it is important to keep in mind that that does not mean that $455 was the average income in the country. There are people in Haiti who, by any standard applied, are wealthy. In fact, Haiti has a greater percentage of millionaires per population than any other country in the Caribbean or Latin America. There are more than 10,000 millionaires in this country of less than 8 million people.

But the vast majority of Haitians live in absolute poverty, with an estimated income of less than $250 a year.

The amount and the distribution of wealth in a nation inevitably affect the overall quality of life in that nation—which, it will be remembered, was one of the reasons some Dominicans braved the dangers of the crossing to Puerto Rico in hopes of improving. A low GNP affects things such as health care, education, life expectancy and so on.

The life expectancy of a Canadian at birth is 80 years; the life expectancy of a Dominican is seven years less, at 73 years. And it is less primarily because the country is poorer–because Dominicans don’t eat as well as Canadians, because they don’t have as much access to medical care as we do, and so on.

But the life expectancy of a Haitian at birth is only 49 years.