There seems to be much to celebrate on the 22nd International Day for the Eradication of Poverty: Over the past two decades, extreme poverty has dropped significantly from 35.4 percent of the global population to just 16.3 percent.
The World Bank, however, has set an ambitious target: Reduce the share of people living on less than $1.25 a day to 3 percent by 2030. But its latest projections only expect the poverty rate to slide down to 4.9 percent by 2030. The bank’s recent Global Monitoring Report further paints a more complex picture of this estimate.
In 1990, three regions were home to the largest numbers of poor people: East Asia and the Pacific, sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. Among them, East Asia and the Pacific and South Asia experienced accelerated growth and emerged as new centers of economic activity in the two decades that followed. But they also became hotbeds of inequality as the gap between the rich and the poor in these regions continued to widen.
About the author
Anna Patricia Valerio
Anna Patricia Valerio is a former Manila-based development analyst who focused on writing innovative, in-the-know content for senior executives in the international development community. Before joining Devex, Patricia wrote and edited business, technology and health stories for BusinessWorld, a Manila-based business newspaper.
