The collapse of the Soviet Union resulted in large declines in GDP per capita, of about 30 to 35% between 1990 and the through year of 1998 (when it was at its minimum). As a result, poverty rates tripled, excess mortality increased, and life expectancy declined. By 1999, during the peak of the poverty crisis, 191 million people were living on less than $5.50 a day. In subsequent years as per capita incomes recovered the poverty rate dropped from 31.4% of the population to 19.6%. The average post-communist country had returned to 1989 levels of per-capita GDP by 2005, although as of 2015 some are still far behind that. According to the World Bank in 2014, around 80 million people were still living on less than $5.00 a day.World Bank data shows that the percentage of the population living in households with consumption or income per person below the poverty line has decreased in each region of the world except Middle East and North Africa since 1990:

Characteristics
The effects of poverty may also be causes as listed above, thus creating a "poverty cycle" operating across multiple levels, individual, local, national and global. Health
One-third of deaths around the world—some 18 million people a year or 50,000 per day—are due to poverty-related causes. People living in developing nations, among them women and children, are over represented among the global poor and these effects of severe poverty. Those living in poverty suffer disproportionately from hunger or even starvation and disease, as well as lower life expectancy.
"Persistent vegetative state"
Persistent vegetative state is the standard usage (except in the UK) for a medical diagnosis, made after numerous neurological and other tests, that due to extensive and irreversible brain damage a patient is highly unlikely ever to achieve higher functions above a vegetative state. This diagnosis does not mean that a doctor has diagnosed improvement as impossible, but does open the possibility, in the US, for a judicial request to end life support. Informal guidelines hold that this diagnosis can be made after four weeks in a vegetative state. US caselaw has shown that successful petitions for termination have been made after a diagnosis of a persistent vegetative state, although in some cases, such as that of Terri Schiavo, such rulings have generated widespread controversy. In the UK, the term is discouraged in favor of two more precisely defined terms that have been strongly recommended by the Royal College of Physicians (RCP). These guidelines recommend using a continuous vegetative state for patients in a vegetative state for more than four weeks. A medical determination of a permanent vegetative state can be made if, after exhaustive testing and a customary 12 months of observation, a medical diagnosis is made that it is impossible by any informed medical expectations that the mental condition will ever improve. Hence, a "continuous vegetative state" in the UK may remain the diagnosis in cases that would be called "persistent" in the US or elsewhere.