Standard of Living

1. Standard of Living Comparing Canada to the World

2. PLO’s – Human Geography • Compare Canada’s Standard of Living with those of developing countries, with reference to poverty and key indicators of human development • Specifically, what indicators are used by the UN to measure Living Standards • Also, what can be done to improve standards (life expectancy, etc.)

3. The UN Human Development ReportFigure 14-1, pg. 341, Fig. 14-2, pg. 342 • An index that ranks countries on three measures: adult literacy, life expectancy and per capita GDP • GDP is total value of all goods and services produced in a country in one year • Divide that number by a country’s population and you have per capita GDP • This report is a crude indicator of levels of economic and social development – countries that rank high are developed and affluent (low rank equals poor development and growth)

5. Developed Nations • This term refers to nations that are industrialized, with their people well-housed, healthy, and educated • Well developed infrastructure such as communication and transportation systems, electrical grid, schools and hospitals • DEVELOPING countries lack modern infrastructure and industry

6. Comparing Living Standards (Food PPT!) • Difficult to do sometimes • Non-monetary transactions are difficult to trace – this makes measuring economic output in developing countries difficult • Wealth can be unevenlydistributed – ie. Saudi Arabia with mega-rich and extreme poor – skews statistics • Quality of life includes health (infant mortality, etc), nutrition, status of women – these are supplied by gov’ts of wealthy nations, not in the poor – hard to account for

7. Poverty • Estimates are controversial, but some measures suggest that ~1.3 billion people live below the poverty line (in the Developing World that equates to earning less than $1 per day) • The poverty line is different in Canada, due to greater cost of living – here we measure by people having to spend more than 56% of their income on life’s necessities • Figure estimated that 5.1 million Canadians were in this category

8. Developing World Poverty • Greatly related to inability to purchase food • Also, debt is a major problem • The debts of these nations are linked to loans that were granted – western nations wanted to help these countries develop their infrastructure – dams, highways, etc • However, many developing countries have been unable to repay these debts, and now payments on these debts take up huge amounts of budgets – money that can’t be spent on education, health, development programs, etc

9. Poverty Cycle • See p. 347 text for detailed version • On a basic level, poor healthcare and nutrition leads to developmental difficulties, which causes problems in literacy and academic progress • This leads to reduced ability to be successful in the workplace, leading to poor wages, poor diet and health, young marriage often occurs as well, with poor job prospects • Families are forced into debt and poverty, leading to malnourished babies, completing the cycle • The key to breaking this cycle is improved education and nutrition/healthcare

10. Solutions • Since WWII, the developed world has been providing aid (money, etc) to the developing world • Aid is dwarfed by military expenditures however • Comes in a variety of forms • MultilateralAid: funded by a number of gov’ts, usually for large scale projects • Tied Aid: conditions are attached, like purchasing goods from certain companies, etc • Aid is received from many sources: UN, CIDA and NGO’s like Oxfam and Rotary