Liberia and the world

I may be working on a project to map the ICT infrastructure in Liberia this fall. Some of my friends and family were asking a bit about Liberia. It has quite the storied past and is now trying to work its way out of a 14 year civil war that pretty much devastated all aspects of the country. The following is a bit of info that I dug up due to our discussion:

I caught a recent article on electricity in the capital of Liberia: http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/liberia_electricity_dc

Also a bit of background if you are interested... https://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/geos/li.html

And for Pammy (who asked if we were to evenly redistribute the income in the world to each man, woman and child, what would the averarge income be?), the world currently has an estimated 6,530,757,077 people (http://www.census.gov/main/www/popclock.html). In 2004, the world GPD (Gross Domestic Product) was estimated at $51,410,000,000,000 (http://www.photius.com/rankings/economy/gdp_2004_0.html) leading me to believe that an average per capita for each person in the world would be about $7,871.98.

So, on average, a family of 4 would bring in $31,487/year...of course this is all based on GDP which is not necessarily the full picture regarding income, but since I'm no economist I use it here as an approximate proxy.

What is interesting is about 1/5 of the world's population lives on less than $1/day (considered extreme poverty) -- about 1.1 billion people (http://earthtrends.wri.org/updates/node/6 and http://devdata.worldbank.org/wdi2005/Section1_1_1.htm). Good news is, they estimate this number will be down to around 858 million by 2015...

If we take the 1/5 of the population out of the the equation (and their $1/day), the remaining 4/5 take in about $9,748.73 -- about $26.71 per day per person...


Hope this clears up all of your questions for the day!

Kipp