One thing is certain, though: given that China has so effectively hauled much of its population out of pauperism, and with North Korea statistically dark, sub-Saharan Africa has the most extreme examples of urban impoverishment.
This impoverishment has occurred even in languages that have historically paid close attention to place, such as Irish or Gaelic.
In an open letter to Tom Clausen, the bank's president, he told him to "stop financing the destruction of the tropical world, the devastation of its remaining forests, the extermination of its wildlife, and the impoverishment and starvation of its human inhabitants".
The likeliest prospect, if Mr Lukashenka seeks to preserve the status quo, is a spiral of impoverishment and repression.
"But Portuguese society as a whole knows that leaving the euro would result in much greater impoverishment than they are experiencing now".
In Cyprus protesters took to the streets angrily to defend their bank deposits, decry their looming impoverishment and denounce Europe, especially Germany.
Impoverishment, violence or both loom in a future that looks bleak for Palestinians, and for Israelis too.
Many Russians still associate liberals such as Messrs Nemtsov and Chubais with impoverishment, chaos and loss of national pride in the 1990s.
WHEN Hugo Chavez, a former paratroop lieutenant-colonel and coup leader, was elected Venezuela's president in December his stated aims were clear enough: to end the corruption spawned by 40 years of rule by a cosily clientelist two-party system, and to reverse the impoverishment and economic malaise into which his oil-rich country had sunk.
Some pundits agonise that profit growth built on the impoverishment of workers at home and the export of jobs abroad as firms outsource operations to China and India cannot be sustained: consumer confidence will fall, demand will plummet and profits will collapse.Others worry that America, in particular, relies too much on financial firms as a source of profit growth.
This was not unreasonable; but the threatening way it negotiated, the craven way England and Australia accommodated it, and the resulting impoverishment of Pakistan, New Zealand and other poorer cricket nations were contemptible.
