Poverty Clock

THE POVERTY CLOCK BEGAN as an idea to demonstrate the extent of poverty in the world. The United Nations Development Program (UNDP) set up the first poverty clock during the fourth World Conference on Women, in Beijing, China, on August 31, 1995. This “clock” consisted of a digitally displayed number that ticked up at a rate of 47 per minute, representing the number of babies born into households suffering from absolute poverty since the beginning of the conference. The commonly used standardized measure of absolute or extreme poverty is the $1-a-day level, which corresponds to a per capita annual income of $365 adjusted for inflation and international differences in costs of living (also known as purchasing power parity, or PPP). By the end of the 10-day conference, 541,228 children had been added to the rolls of those in absolute poverty.

The poverty clock was subsequently moved to the United Nations' (UN) headquarters in New York City and turned on again on January 17, 1996, to mark the beginning of the UN's International Year of the Eradication of Poverty. The clock, which increased by roughly 25 million persons per year, remained on throughout the year as a stark reminder of the problem of absolute poverty throughout the world. The clock was also prominently featured on the UNDP's website.

The clock was eventually turned off because of the theoretical difficulties of measuring changes in the number of persons in poverty solely by calculating the number of children born into poor families. The poverty clock made no allowances for moving its numbers backward when economic development lifted families up from under the poverty line.

Indeed, over the period during which the poverty clock was increasing by 25 million per year, the actual number of people living in absolute poverty declined. By the $1-a-day threshold, the number of people living in poverty in 2001 was just over 1 billion while the corresponding statistics were 1.40 billion in 1980 and 1.14 billion in 1990.