A Collection of Statistics

A collection of statistics regarding the developing world.

• 20% of the world’s population are currently using 85% of the world’s resources.
• The U.S. has 5% of the world’s population and uses 40% of the world’s resources.
• The richest countries – Europe, the U.S. Canada, Australia, and Japan – use 65% of the world’s electricity.
• $40 billion annually would provide social services to all people in developing countries.
• Comparatively, the worldwide budget for military spending is $780 billion. (As estimated by the U.N. Development Program in 1998). More recent estimates put this as high as $1,000 billion.
  

 Poverty

• 2.8 billion people—more than half the people in developing countries—live on less than $700 a year. Of these, 1.2 billion earn less than $1 a day. 2.8 billion on less than $2 a day

 Mortality

• 33,000 children die every day in developing countries
• Each minute more than one woman dies during childbirth
• In many developing countries, life expectancy has declined, for example, in Botswana the average person now lives 10 years less than in 1990.

 Health

• Malaria, affects an estimated 300 million people and kills at least one million people each year, three-quarters of them children under five.
• In all, 36.1 million individuals are estimated to be living with HIV or AIDS.
• 11 million children under five dying annually from preventable causes (1998)

Water and sanitation

• Contaminated drinking water and an inadequate supply of water cause diseases that account for 10 percent of the total burden of disease in developing countries.
• In 1997, approximately 1.5 billion people in low and middle-income economies lacked access to safe water supplies. And in Sub-Saharan Africa fewer than half the population has access.
• At the present rate of progress, one-third of all low-income people—over 900 million—will still lack adequate sanitation in the year 2015.

  Source: Share the Worlds Resources (STWR) – www.stwr.org