Pathways From Poverty: The Correlations And Probabilities Of Penury Life In 131 Countries, 1980-2022

By separating countries into richer and poorer categories, this paper investigates the incidence of poverty in 131 countries—65 and 66 richer and poorer countries respectively. The paper considers 18 socio-economic variables to produce 262 observations and 4,454 data points (2,210 and 2,244 for the richer and poorer countries respectively). The study cuts across two periods (1980 to 1999, and 2000 to 2022) to uncover some revealing attributes of the incidence of global poverty. Unlike the contemporary frequentist models that are utilized to study penury life, this paper takes a unique approach to investigating poverty in richer and poorer countries. High density (credible) interval reveals that about 72 to 88 percent of children are more likely to engage in economic activity regardless of household monetary poverty. Ultimately, the data reveal that 4 factors could sufficiently explain the incidence of poverty in richer and poorer countries—income distribution, access to labor markets, public policies, and national welfare (income distribution and access to labor markets in the richer countries, and income distribution, public policies, and national welfare in the poorer countries).