Extreme poverty. The term “extreme poverty” has a set technical meaning: it means you have a daily income of less than $1.9/day. The term “poverty” in many countries on Level 4 is a relative term, and the “poverty line” may refer to the threshold for eligibility for social welfare or the official statistical measure of poverty in that country. In Scandinavia, the official poverty lines are 20 times higher than the poverty lines in the poorest countries, like Malawi, even after adjusting for the large differences in purchasing power; see World Bank[17]. The latest US census estimates that 13 percent of the population lives below its poverty line, putting it at approximately $20/day. The social and economic challenges of being among the poorest in a rich country should not be neglected (see World Bank[5]), but it is not the same thing as being extremely poor.
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