The poor economy meant that Gibraltar's population barely changed between 1830 and 1880, but it was still relatively more prosperous than the severely impoverished south of Spain.

The government, dominated by Sunni Arabs, imported mostly Shiite Arabs from the impoverished south into the Kirkuk area.

Yet the East German Angela Merkel knows only too well that vast swathes of her land have morphed into a Teutonic Mezzogiorno - the term for Italy's impoverished south.

Dashed expectations were frequently cited recently as one reason why Jordanians in the impoverished, arid south were so quick to erupt in fury when bread prices were abruptly increased earlier in August.

Still, the Government also seemed to have seized some of the political initiative with offers of change that implied a new willingness to admit that the impoverished south had fallen behind the industrial hubs of the northern and central regions.

Lucania, now called Basilicata, was historically one of the poorest and most backward regions of the impoverished Italian south.

The government of Sudan signed a preliminary peace accord on Friday night with a rebel group from the country's impoverished south that could end one of Africa's longest-running civil wars, even as the conflict in the western Darfur region continued.

Joseph Braude, a young Iraqi-American whose book "The New Iraq" will be published this month, says that the impoverished Shiite south is "not an existential threat to the map of Iraq.

It also became clear that Bechtel would not expand service to the impoverished south, where the company had no profits to gain from an expensive expansion.

After moving to Tehran in the early 1960s, where he and his brother, Akbar, founded a medical clinic in impoverished south of the city, he became acquainted with the literary intelligentsia of Iran.