Could the UN have met its first Millennium Development Goal – to halve extreme poverty between 1990 and 2015 – five years early?
The World bank thinks so. In an uplifting report released on Wednesday, it revealed that the percentage of people living on less than $1.25 a day declined in every region of the developing world between 2005 and 2008, according to more than 850 houshold surveys. What’s more, in spite of global food, fuel and financial crises, that trend continued post-2008 – and preliminary surveys for 2010 show that the number of people in extreme poverty was less than half that of 1990.
As you’d expect, progress has been uneven. The most dramatic improvements can be seen in east Asia, which in the early 1980s had the highest incidence of extreme poverty in the world. But just 14 per cent of its population were living on less that $1.25 a day in 2008, compared with more than three quarters in 1981.
China’s economic boom helped 662m people escape poverty over the period although, in 2008, 173m were still living below the $1.25 threshold. In the developing world outside China, the poverty rate fell from 41 per cent to 25 per cent – but because of the increasing world population, the total number living in poverty was unchanged at around 1.1bn.
Nevertheless, this was the first time the World Bank recorded a decline in poverty in all six developing regions of the world it measures (it has been monitoring extreme poverty over three-year intervals since 1981). Less than half of Sub-Saharan Africa now lives blow the poverty line; the proportion of the poor in South Asia is also at record lows.
All good news – but there are still expected to be a billion poor people worldwide by 2015. And that’s at the low $1.25 poverty line: a threshold which takes poverty as defined in the world’s 10 to 20 poorest countries. Much less progress has been made in getting over a more comfortable $2 a day level, the median poverty line for developing countries.
The number of people living between $1.25 and $2 doubled, to 1.18bn, between 1981 and 2008. Hundreds of millions may have escaped absolute poverty – but their position remains precarious.
Source: Beyond Brics FT blog
