I was just reading a study authored by Stanford University. According to the study, poverty in Costa Rica is low by Latin American standards. If poverty is defined as households with income of $2 or less per person per day (purchasing power parity, PPP), then 9 percent of Costa Rica's people are found to live in poverty, a lower rate than for any Latin American country except Uruguay and less than half the regional average of 25 percent. Applying a $1-per-day poverty line (PPP), the poverty rate in Costa Rica is only 2 percent, one-fifth of the Latin American average. Poverty declined significantly between 1989 and 1994, but has remained essentially constant since then. The proportion of the population that is poor declined from 31.7 to 22.9 percent between 1989 and 1994, and has hovered in the 23-24 percent range since 1994. Similarly, extreme poverty fell from 9.9 percent in 1989 to 6.8 percent in 1994, but remained at 6.6 percent in 2004. This lack of progress over the last decade is surprising given that per capita GDP growth averaged 2.4 percent over the 1994-2004 period. Indeed, many empirical studies show that economic growth is normally associated with declining poverty.