What is the scale of world poverty?
Global poverty rates continued to fall in the first four years of the 21st century according to new estimates published in the “World Development Indicators 2007”, released this week by the World Bank.
The proportion of people living on less than $1 a day fell to 18.4 percent in 2004, leaving an estimated 985 million people living in extreme poverty. By comparison, the total number of extreme poor was 1.25 billion in 1990. Two-dollar-a-day poverty rates are falling too, but an estimated 2.6 billion people, almost half the population of the developing world, were still living below that level in 2004.
Although this is good news, the 260M drop in the number living on less than a dollar a day is more than accounted for by the 300M taken out of extreme poverty in China. In sub–Saharan Africa, extreme poverty has actually risen by 60 million.
April 17th, 2007 at 7:37 pm
I’m not sure how the World Bank arrived at their 2004 headline figures. Is “living in extreme poverty” meant to be equivalent to “living on less than $1 a day” — as suggested by the first sentence in your second paragraph (which is taken directly from the World Bank report)? If so, and if 985 million represented 18.4% of the population, then the world population in 2004 should have been about 5.3 billion. But it was actually more like 6.4 billion. (5.3 billion was the approximate world population in 1990 — is that a coincidence?)