WHEN WE SAW the headline on this Business Insider story – The Poorest Countries In The Developed World – we braced ourselves.

As it turns out Ireland is NOT in the list – but the UK and the US are.

This is Business Insider’s Mamta Badker explaining how they came up with the list:

Since the mid-1980s, countries like UK, Japan and Israel have seen a steep increase in poverty rates, according to a new OECD report that looks at poverty across its member countries.

We ranked high-income OECD economies based on their poverty rate  and culled historical data to give a bigger picture of poverty in member nations.

These countries, considered to be developed, had poverty rates that exceeded the OECD average of 11.1 per cent.

Chile for instance witnessed a drop in its poverty rate, but at 18.9 per cent a vast portion of its population remains impoverished. Read on to see which countries have large impoverished populations.

The list goes like this: 1. Mexico 2. Israel 3. Chile 4. The US 5. Turkey 6. Japan 7. Korea 8. Australia 9. Estonia 10. Spain 11. Portugal 12. Greece 13. Italy 14. Canada 15. The UK.

Note: This list only considers OECD countries. Data released April 12, 2011.

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