As I was doing research for my topic, The Social Welfare and Economic Imbalance In The Balkans, i came across this article that really blew my mind. As this is a class about social welfare and it encourages our questioning of these institutions, I remembered that it also provides for the analysis of these functions through different angles. The one angle I took is to see how these factors might correlate or reciprocate on the other side of the world. I was — at the same time — shocked and not, when I read this:
“One out of five Europeans — 93 million people — lives under the poverty line. The poor include rural people in Central and Eastern Europe and ethnic minorities such as the Roma, who are among the poorest people in Europe. The Roma comprise almost 40 per cent of poor people in Romania and Bulgaria. More than eight out of ten in the Republic of Moldova live below the poverty line, many of them in rural areas. In the southern and eastern zones of Europe, agriculture earns 30 per cent or more of GDP and a large proportion of the population is rural. More than half of the people in Albania, Armenia and the Republic of Moldova live in rural areas. In the heavily industrialized northern and western zones of Europe, agriculture contributes one tenth of the gross domestic product (GDP). The rural population varies from 25 to 40 per cent of total population. The EU earmarks a significant part of its common budget for development of the least advantaged rural areas within the Union. Development funds that are an integral component of the EU’s agricultural policy will benefit the Eastern European countries that have recently become members of the EU. An additional part of the EU’s common development budget is allocated for poverty reduction in developing countries throughout the world.”
Perhaps this might not strike you as anything crazy, but this — in conjunction with another article that I read regarding a mere 58,000,000 children living under the harsh conditions of poverty — might brew something in you. Is there anything to be learned here? You read things like these, and for the most of us that are immigrants here at Baruch, what do you feel? Would you rather sacrifice (if you could) the situation here to make things better in Europe where many of you have younger relatives and old grandparents if you could? This might not apply to everyone, but if not Europe, consider those living among extreme poverty in Latin and South America; Some Guatemalan workers make a whopping $2 a day!
Based on the reading we are just completing where we see highlighted the very low poverty rates for many European countries, I think the statistics brought forth in this post are more striking when you figure that these averages are obviously coming certain countries with astronomically high poverty rates.
It occurs to me that while we discuss “poverty”, we have not much discussed it in the grander scheme of P-O-V-E-R-T-Y. You know, the U.N. definition of earnings of less than $1 per day poverty.
I also wonder… what is there to be said for the relative happiness of the very poor, poor, working poor, and so on…