100 List Of Top Poorest Countries in The World

List Of Top Poorest Countries in The World

List Of Top Poorest Countries in The World, according to the latest report by the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The ranking is based on the GDP per capita of the 187 countries, which is a measure of the total output of a country in a year divided by the number of people in that country.

South Sudan is the poorest country in the world, with a GDP per capita of US $228, while Luxembourg is the richest country, with a GDP per capita of US $105,803. The figures below are in the current US dollars.

List Of Top Poorest Countries in The World

The world has enough wealth and resources to ensure that the entire human race enjoys a basic standard of living. Yet people in countries like Burundi, South Sudan and the Central African Republic—the three poorest in the world—continue to live in desperate poverty. For other likely contenders for the undesirable title of poorest of the poor—like Afghanistan, Syria and Lebanon—years of military, social, political turmoil make it impossible to attempt any assessment due to the lack of reliable economic figures.

But how do we measure how poor or wealthy a given nation is compared to another? While GDP per capita is often considered the standard metric, by compensating for differences in living costs and rates of inflation the purchasing power parity (PPP) can better assess an individual’s buying power in any given country.

It is hard to pinpoint a single cause of long-term poverty. Dictatorial and corrupt governments can make what could be a very rich nation into a poor one. And so does a history of exploitative colonization, weak rule of law, war and social unrest, severe climate conditions or hostile, aggressive neighbors. Hence why economists often refer to “cycles” of poverty. For example, a country in debt will not be able to afford good schools, and a poorly educated workforce will be less capable of fixing problems and creating conditions that will attract foreign investment.

Underprivileged households worldwide, it goes without saying, suffered the worst social and economic consequences of the coronavirus pandemic. In countries with high shares of informal employment, lockdowns fueled joblessness and abrupt loss of income for many of those workers. Health costs associated with the virus pushed or sent further into poverty hundreds of millions across all regions. The pandemic also exacerbated preexisting gender occupational differences, driving many women deeper into poverty. And as we already indicated, lockdowns and school closures are expected to cast a long shadow on millions of children’s future prospects too, with the World Bank forecasting that in low and middle-income countries the current generation of students will suffer a loss in lifetime earning of $17 trillion.

Before Covid-19, the fraction of the world’s population living in extreme poverty, meaning on less than $1.90 a day, had fallen below 10% from more than 35% in 1990. The pandemic not only halted but reversed that progress: by the end of 2021, the IMF has estimated, an additional 150 million people are likely to have entered the ranks of the extreme poor.

Then, the war in Ukraine came to make things worse, triggering sharply higher prices for staples and wide supply shortages, hurting especially poor households globally. “This crisis unfolds while the global economy was on a mending path but had not yet fully recovered from the COVID-19 pandemic, with a significant divergence between the economic recoveries of advanced economies and emerging market and developing ones,” IMF’s chief economist and director of research, Pierre-Olivier Gourinchas, wrote in the foreword to last April’s Economic Outlook report.

Possibly the worst-case scenario materialized. Just three months later, in an update to the previous report where global growth was downgraded and inflation forecasts revised up, the IMF warned that the food crisis had worsened drastically: “Low-income countries, where food represents a larger share of consumption, are feeling the impact of this inflation most keenly. Countries with diets tilted toward commodities with the largest price gains (especially wheat and corn), those more dependent on food imports, and those with a large pass-through from global to local staple food prices are most distressed. Low-income countries whose people were already experiencing acute malnutrition and excess mortality before the war, especially in sub-Saharan Africa, have suffered a particularly severe impact.” Meanwhile, the IMF’s sister institution, the World Bank, has estimated that for each one percentage point increase in food prices, 10 million more people will fall into extreme poverty worldwide.

These reversals of gain in poverty reduction are especially visible in the world’s 10 poorest countries, and all of them, as suggested by the IMF, are found in Africa. In these countries, on average, the individual share of the gross domestic output is roughly $1,350. By contrast, in the top 10 richest nations this figure is close to $100,000.

Three of the countries in our list are in or part of the Sahel region, where persistent and widespread droughts cause food shortages and associated medical and social problems. Five of them are landlocked, putting them at a considerable disadvantage relative to those with access to maritime trade when it comes to both importing and exporting goods. All have experienced political instability, disputed elections, and ethnic or religious strife.