Poverty and Income Distribution
Behind the facade of an affluent nation, Egypt is actually facing high levels of unemployment and immense poverty. The majority of its younger population is struggling with unemployment and destitution, and heightening food prices in Cairo
According to an Associated Press report, nearly half of all Egyptians live under or just above the poverty line. In fact, more than 15 million Egyptians live on less than $1 a day, and the figure is steadily increasing. The Minister of Economic Development, Othman Mohamed Othman, once mentioned that the poverty rate in Egypt had rose from 19 percent of the population in 2005 to 21 percent in 2009.
Various statistical databases show that Egypt has:
· A population of 80 million, with 33 percent who are 14 years and below; and 20 percent of the population living below the poverty line.
· A labor force of 26 million, with 32 percent working in agriculture, 17 percent in industry, and 51 percent in the service sector.
· An unemployment rate of 9.7 percent.
· A literacy rate of above 71 percent, with males at 83 percent and females at 59.4 percent
Read more about this topic: Agriculture In Egypt
Famous quotes containing the words poverty and, poverty, income and/or distribution:
“Crimes increase as education, opportunity, and property decrease. Whatever spreads ignorance, poverty and, discontent causes crime.... Criminals have their own responsibility, their own share of guilt, but they are merely the hand.... Whoever interferes with equal rights and equal opportunities is in some ... real degree, responsible for the crimes committed in the community.”
—Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1822–1893)
“Public money is like holy water; everyone helps himself to it.”
—Italian proverb, pt. 5, epigraph, Graham Hancock, Lords of Poverty (1989)
“The bread-winner must toil as in the fruitless effort of a troubled dream while the expenditure of an uneducated wife discounts the income in the lack of understanding to discern the broad possibilities of an intelligent economy.”
—Anna Eugenia Morgan (1845–1909)
“In this distribution of functions, the scholar is the delegated intellect. In the right state, he is, Man Thinking. In the degenerate state, when the victim of society, he tends to become a mere thinker, or, still worse, the parrot of other men’s thinking.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)