Digg posting: “Between 1990 and 2002 more than 174 million people escaped poverty in China, about 1.2 million per month. With an estimated $23 billion in Chinese exports in 2005, Wal-Mart might well be single-handedly responsible for bringing about 38,000 people out of poverty in China each month, about 460,000 per year.”
Interesting article. Looking at the economics of sweatshops, being employed in a sweatshop is better than being in rural poverty. A sweatshop worker makes twice as much as the average person working on a farm in China. Another good point from the article was that many of the people who worked in sweatshops in Korea, Japan, and U.S. are now middle class. Will not the same thing happen in China?