[Excerpt] According to the latest figures, today an estimated 3.1 billion people still live in absolute poverty, essentially all of them in the low- and middle-income countries of Asia, Latin America, and Africa and none of them in what are traditionally called the “developed economies” of North America (excluding Mexico), Western Europe, and selected parts of Asia and Oceania. This book is about how the poor live and work and what actions the world community could take to improve poor people’s earning opportunities as a central component of a multifaceted program aimed at ending the scourge of absolute economic misery.