Lowest Population for Poverty to Exist?

I maybe VERY wrong, but what I see is that the less populated a country, the less its poverty level too. I think it has something with job and resources availability.

So here's the question: what is the lowest population threshold that allow poverty to exist? It doesn't have to be numbers, but maybe ratio of people to resources.

Thanks in advance!
 

MAlexMatt

Banned
This question is just about impossible to answer comprehensively. I mean, you might as well be asking, "Invent a general theory of economic development for me".
 
You can get poverty in any size population. One guy stranded on a desert island is extremely poor in absolute terms.

To the extent there's a correlation, I suspect the key distinction is the availability of unclaimed arable land. The ability to head out west and claim a homestead places a bit of a floor on how poor you can get unless you're doing something seriously wrong or are suffering from particularly bad luck.
 

MAlexMatt

Banned
You can get poverty in any size population. One guy stranded on a desert island is extremely poor in absolute terms.

To the extent there's a correlation, I suspect the key distinction is the availability of unclaimed arable land. The ability to head out west and claim a homestead places a bit of a floor on how poor you can get unless you're doing something seriously wrong or are suffering from particularly bad luck.

There are transaction costs involved that mean, even with an open frontier, poverty is still inevitable. The causes of poverty are so nuanced as to make this question unanswerable without decades of scholarly work, and even then you'd only be scratching the surface.
 
To answer the question you would first need to define what you consider poverty? A certain amount of money such as 1 or 2$ a day is usually used. Than in the most macroeconomic (and cold) calculation could estimate the possibility for poverty to seize to exist.

When we view labour as just another product than the price of labour drops when more of it is available. We could then in theory calculate at which point the additon of an extra person to the labour market would push wages below the poverty threshold. Even in a macroeconomic sense it's more tricky because the addition of an extra person would also have an effect on the minimal cost of living because the demand and therefore the price for basic goods would likely go up. But this could generally give a very rough estimate of when the extinction of poverty would be possible.

However poverty has more to do with an unequal division of wealth rather than a absolute lack of resources. So fair distribution and good government policy are very important. The nasty thing is that countries that are poor and overcrowded are more likely to have corrupt and/or unstable governments which in turn keeps them poor. This is called a poverty trap and is a serious problem to development if one believes the Jeffrey Sachs school of development economics.
 
One.

You have it reversed. You need a certain population to create WEALTH and to allow some to enjoy leisure and luxury. Any number can struggle to survive and live in poverty.
 
What kind of poverty are we talking about? On one hand you can have population where wealth is distrubuted fairly evenly but overall there is little wealth to go around. You can have agricultural society where people are not starving but aren't getting rich either and have to work hard but have access to more or less everything that society can offer.

Or you can have society where bottom class has fraction of what upper class has but are still better off than average member of previous society (which is mostly the case with poor in western world).

One.

You have it reversed. You need a certain population to create WEALTH and to allow some to enjoy leisure and luxury. Any number can struggle to survive and live in poverty.

However you create artificial division into "rich" and "poor". You can have "well off" and "even better off". Those below aren't poor, those above just have more.
 
What kind of poverty are we talking about? On one hand you can have population where wealth is distrubuted fairly evenly but overall there is little wealth to go around. You can have agricultural society where people are not starving but aren't getting rich either and have to work hard but have access to more or less everything that society can offer.

Or you can have society where bottom class has fraction of what upper class has but are still better off than average member of previous society (which is mostly the case with poor in western world).



However you create artificial division into "rich" and "poor". You can have "well off" and "even better off". Those below aren't poor, those above just have more.

You do have a point.

If you belong to a nomadic tribe that follows the herds, and everyone from chieftain on down eats the same food and sleeps in the same tents no one is really poor or rich.

It requires not only a certain population but a certain type of society to develop distinct social classes. You also likely need people who value land and have a sense of ownership as well. When one man lives in a castle and another in a mud hut it's a pretty clear distinction.

However the point remains that you need a certain population large enough to grow the food and take care of the basic needs before you can really get different classes that become 'poor' or 'rich.'
 
It requires not only a certain population but a certain type of society to develop distinct social classes. You also likely need people who value land and have a sense of ownership as well. When one man lives in a castle and another in a mud hut it's a pretty clear distinction.

You will always have distinctions. They may be clearly visible and large (castle vs mud hut, in your case, or eating meat and having vine every day vs eating meat on holidays and drinking water) or small (better tent, two cloaks instead of one, better horses, better and larger portion of meat, chainmail vs leather armor etc).

However the point remains that you need a certain population large enough to grow the food and take care of the basic needs before you can really get different classes that become 'poor' or 'rich.'

Well, you need population large enough to take care of basic needs and grow enough food to support those who don't produce food. If you can have potters who don't work the fields and trade their products for food they can be considered rich(er), or at least better off because they don't have to work as hard but in the end eat just as well. Or even people who grow luxury items, such as grapes or fruit. Which is still food but not something neccessary for survival such as wheat. Or even farmers who are better off than others due to better soil, better placement of their fields etc. You'll not get distinction of rich/poor, some will just be a bit better off, having to work less hard for same result or get more return for same work thus eating a bit better or trading surplus for something else.
 
Jersey in th Channel Islands don't have anybody below the 'poverty line' however you wish to define it in raw or relative terms, and we are a population of about 98,000 people. We also have the 6th highest GDP per capita in the world. EDIT: (And only about 54% of that population is actually in work, and not dependants; given the approximate 43% of all income ends up being taxed back to the States via various mediums, that places a Jersey worker at being about 4 times more 'productive' than an English one in terms of generating wealth. Our Education system regularly produces grades that are 20% better than the UK, and while I don't have the university figures knowledge off the top of my head, a substantial proportion of the islands population has university level education. We have our own version of the NHS in the Jersey Hospital, run our own airport (that used to be something like the 5th busiest in Europe), deal with our own waste, hell, we have tonnes going for us...)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jersey

That might help answer you question.


Although my take on this might be that small nations have high wealth, because they have for a long time had to rely on outside trade, rather than internal autarky to survive. That means that wealth gets concentrated in a small juristrictive area, and hence the level of development within that area is much higher than in other parts of the world. Therefore nobody (very few inderviduals) live in poverty in these lands. Hence why small nations appear to have less poverty.
 
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I was visiting a historical site, I believe it was the birthplace of Robert E. Lee and there was some actual archaeological stuff nearby looking at even older settlements, and one of the interesting factoids that came out

was that the discussion of when the masters and the slaves started living in different rooms.

ie, when you have social structures, even ones that include slaves, but everyone still lives in the same large room or at least with small alcoves off the central living area, you have a great deal of connection, ie everyone is still part of the same group.

But when you start having multiple floor structures, and the upper class can live above and separate from the stinking lower classes, then it is easier for the upper classes to inflict inhumane conditions on the lower classes, since they do not live with them.

Would not create inequality, but would greatly increase it.

At least that seemed to be the theory of the people who conducted the dig as explained in the little signs.
 
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You do have a point.

If you belong to a nomadic tribe that follows the herds, and everyone from chieftain on down eats the same food and sleeps in the same tents no one is really poor or rich.

It requires not only a certain population but a certain type of society to develop distinct social classes. You also likely need people who value land and have a sense of ownership as well. When one man lives in a castle and another in a mud hut it's a pretty clear distinction.

However the point remains that you need a certain population large enough to grow the food and take care of the basic needs before you can really get different classes that become 'poor' or 'rich.'

The modern definition of poverty is based on relative terms. The poor have less than half of the mean income. Based on that definition there's no chance ever to eradicate poverty with a population of more than 1.
 
Some of the most populated and even densely populated countries in the world are fairly rich. Japan, Hong Kong, Monoco, Singapore, Bahrain, Malta, Bermuda, Taiwan and South Korea among others. There are some (Actually fewer) that are not densely popuated and rich including Greenland, Australia, Iceland, Canada, and Oman among others. Population density and wealth aren't closely related.
 
I think the relation between population density and wealth is only significant if you compare countries with comparable degrees of fertility and, what is more important, societies that have hunter-gatherer economies.

This means it is important for societies, where wealth is literally found in the form of edible plants or animals that can be hunted. In this type of society, the amount of goods is more or less static - you don't get more plants or animals when more people settle the land - and the more people there are in this hunter-gatherer economy, the less there is for each individual.

In more modern societies, this type of relation between population density and wealth no longer exists. After all people do not find wealth in an agrarian or industrial society, they create it, and the more people there are, the more they can create.

In an industrial society, there is even a relationship between the size of a population and wealth that is the reverse of that found in a hunter-gatherer economy. The bigger a population is, the more likely it is that labor-saving machines are worthwhile to use, because these machines are only economical, if they can produce in large numbers, and this is only worthwhile, if large numbers can be sold to a large population.


Looking at examples from the real world, you will find that
Singapore with a population of 7,315 persons per square kilometer or 18,943 persons per square mile has more than twenty times the per capita income of North Korea with only 198 persons per square kilometer and 513 persons per square mile.
So the much more densely populated city state is incomparably richer than the less densely populated totalitarian dictatorship.
(Officially North Korea has a per capita income of 2,400$ per year, and Singapore one of 59,711$)
 
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