麻豆淫院

Although living standards have generally improved globally over the past three decades, stark and persistent inequalities remain鈥攂oth between countries and within them, particularly between urban and rural areas. These gaps highlight where efforts to reduce poverty need to be intensified to ensure that everyone has the means for a decent life.

A study in Nature Communications uses data from households in 75 low- and middle-income countries, and shows that 94.9% of households lack at least one of ten fundamental living standards. Nearly two鈥恡hirds fall short on at least one鈥恡hird of them. This number is notably higher than poverty shares calculated with other poverty measures and indices.

These findings come from a comprehensive analysis using the Decent Living Standards (DLS) framework developed at IIASA, which redefines how poverty is measured鈥攏ot by income alone, but by whether people can meet their most basic physical and social needs.

"Income doesn't tell us enough," explains IIASA Migration and Sustainable Development Research Group Leader, Roman Hoffmann, the lead author of the study. "It's about whether people can meet their basic needs. When we look at who has access to essential services, resources, and infrastructure, deep and persistent inequalities become apparent."

Unlike conventional poverty metrics, which often condense deprivation into a single score, the DLS framework evaluates ten separate dimensions of well-being. Seven relate to physical needs, such as housing, nutrition, and sanitation, while the remaining three concern social participation, including access to education, mobility, and communication. The approach is based on the idea that all of these needs are non鈥恘egotiable and being deprived of any one of them signals a shortfall in living a decent life.

Across the dimensions, the largest deprivation can be observed for modern means of food preparation (unfulfilled for 72.2% of households in the sample), access to health care (68.0%), adequate housing (54.8%), and adequate sanitation facilities (47.9%). About 21.3% of households in the last DHS wave reported at least one household member showing nutritional deficits, including signs of undernutrition for adults or wasting and stunting for children.

"Poverty is not one thing. It's a web of constraints that people face all at once," said co鈥恆uthor Omkar Patange, a researcher in the IIASA Economic Frontiers Program. "If you can't refrigerate food, get to a clinic, or afford school fees, your life is shaped by a series of daily trade鈥恛ffs. That's what we're trying to capture."

Regional disparities are stark. Sub鈥怱aharan Africa had the lowest attainment of decent living standards, with just 12% of households meeting two鈥恡hirds of the DLS thresholds. In comparison, that figure was 37% in South Asia, 44% in Latin America and the Caribbean, and more than 70% in Eastern Europe and Central Asia. Even in countries where some progress has been made, rural areas continue to lag behind. The authors found that rural鈥恥rban gaps in living standards have remained largely unchanged over the past thirty years.

"We were surprised to see that the rural鈥恥rban divide has not narrowed," notes IIASA researcher Caroline Zimm, another co鈥恆uthor of the study. "We often assume that development automatically reaches everyone, but our data shows that's far from the case."

Socioeconomic factors such as education, occupation, and household size also play a significant role. The authors argue that these patterns point to systemic inequalities that policies must address more directly.

The implications of the research are far鈥恟eaching. The authors call for a shift toward multidimensional poverty reduction strategies that focus not only on income, but on sustainably expanding access to the goods and services that people need to live healthy, secure, and connected lives without harming the natural environment. The study also emphasizes the importance of continued investment in household鈥恖evel, subnational data to inform these efforts.

"There's a real risk that we'll lose the ability to track these issues if funding for surveys like the DHS program is cut," says Hoffmann. "Without this kind of data, we won't know who is being left behind or how to help them."

Encouragingly, previous research suggests that meeting decent living standards for everyone would require only a small fraction of today's global energy and material use, meaning that fighting poverty does not have to come at the cost of sustainability. Reaching that goal will however require coordinated, well鈥恌unded policies that target the most underserved communities.

"The right to a decent life shouldn't depend on where you're born, but without bold action, we're at risk of letting those with the fewest resources fall even further behind," Hoffmann concludes.

This work has produced a new subnational dataset that offers a more detailed and actionable picture of where multiple deprivations persist, and how progress (or lack of it) has unfolded over time. By making this dataset , the authors hope to support further research and inform more targeted, effective policy responses.