A World Bank report shows a broad-based reduction in extreme poverty — and indicates that the global recession, contrary to economists’ expectations, did not increase poverty in the developing world.
The report shows that for the first time the proportion of people living in extreme poverty — on less than US$1.25 a day — fell in every developing region between 2005 and 2008. And the biggest recession since the Great Depression seems not to have thrown that trend off course, preliminary data from 2010 show.
The progress is so dramatic that the world has met the UN’s Millennium Development Goals to cut extreme poverty in half five years before its 2015 deadline.
“This is very good news,” said Jeffrey Sachs, director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University and the former director of the Millennium Development Goals project. “There has been broad-based progress in fighting poverty and accelerating progress. There’s a lot to be happy about.”
The report shows that despite the world entering a recession in 2009, poverty did not increase in developing nations.
That is contrary to the World Bank’s own expectations. In a year-end 2008 report, the Washington-based development institution warned: “Unemployment is on the rise in industrial countries and poverty is set to increase across low and middle-income countries, bringing with it a substantial deterioration in conditions for the world’s most vulnerable.”
However, that did not happen. Preliminary surveys for 2010 show that the proportion of people in the developing world living in extreme poverty fell.
That is because of strong growth in countries like Brazil, India and China, in particular — growth that helped buoy economies in Africa and South America. High commodity prices also aided exporting nations.
Market conditions also favored developing countries. Economists had theorized that the credit crunch and recession would cause a flight to the safety of developed nations. However, shortly after the recession — with growth stagnating in countries like the US and in western Europe — the world’s investors plowed money into emerging markets.
“In the past, economic crises in the rich world had a big and immediate impact on the developing world,” said Charles Kenny, a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development, a Washington-based research institution. “But this time, the impact was much smaller, and we did not see developing countries follow the United States and Europe into long recessions and slow recoveries.”
“That’s good news for all concerned because growth in developing countries has helped developed countries as well,” he said.
The report contained a raft of statistics showing broad declines in poverty throughout the 2000s. For the first time since the World Bank started keeping statistics in 1981, poverty fell in every region of the world on a three-year timeframe.
In sub-Saharan Africa, the proportion of the population living in extreme poverty fell below 50 percent for the first time. And between 1981 and 2008, poverty fell to less than a quarter of the developing world’s population, from more than half.
Much of the story was about China, which moved nearly 700 million people out of poverty between 1981 and 2008, with the proportion of its population living in extreme poverty falling to 13 percent from 84 percent during that period. The country’s annual pace of economic growth never dipped below 9 percent, even in 2009, when the world’s economy contracted.
However, perhaps the most surprising success story is sub-Saharan Africa, where the proportion of people living in extreme poverty actually increased through the 1990s, before declining in the 2000s.
“People used to worry: ‘Is Africa going to be poor forever?’” Kenny said. “Well, it doesn’t really look like it, does it?”
Indeed, extreme poverty in the Middle East and North Africa fell to 2.7 percent in 2008 from 4.2 percent in 2002, and extreme poverty in sub-Saharan Africa fell to 47.5 percent in 2008 from 55.7 percent in 2002.
“Long-term changes are really starting to take hold,” said Sachs, citing favorable market conditions, policies to tackle public health problems, as well as technological change bringing tools like cellphones and Internet connections to even the most remote and rural areas.
Sachs said that climate change and its attending droughts and floods, the threat of armed conflict and a persistently high birth rate among the very poor threatened to reverse the decline in poverty. However, he said he likely saw them getting better.
“Looking at the balance of data, this is a very promising time for fighting poverty,” Sachs said.
Nearly half of China’s major cities are suffering “moderate to severe” levels of subsidence, putting millions of people at risk of flooding, especially as sea levels rise, according to a study of nationwide satellite data released yesterday. The authors of the paper, published by the journal Science, found that 45 percent of China’s urban land was sinking faster than 3mm per year, with 16 percent at more than 10mm per year, driven not only by declining water tables, but also the sheer weight of the built environment. With China’s urban population already in excess of 900 million people, “even a small portion
UNSETTLING IMAGES: The scene took place in front of TV crews covering the Trump trial, with a CNN anchor calling it an ‘emotional and unbelievably disturbing moment’ A man who doused himself in an accelerant and set himself on fire outside the courthouse where former US president Donald Trump is on trial has died, police said yesterday. The New York City Police Department (NYPD) said the man was declared dead by staff at an area hospital. The man was in Collect Pond Park at about 1:30pm on Friday when he took out pamphlets espousing conspiracy theories, tossed them around, then doused himself in an accelerant and set himself on fire, officials and witnesses said. A large number of police officers were nearby when it happened. Some officers and bystanders rushed
HYPOCRISY? The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs yesterday asked whether Biden was talking about China or the US when he used the word ‘xenophobic’ US President Joe Biden on Wednesday called for a hike in steel tariffs on China, accusing Beijing of cheating as he spoke at a campaign event in Pennsylvania. Biden accused China of xenophobia, too, in a speech to union members in Pittsburgh. “They’re not competing, they’re cheating. They’re cheating and we’ve seen the damage here in America,” Biden said. Chinese steel companies “don’t need to worry about making a profit because the Chinese government is subsidizing them so heavily,” he said. Biden said he had called for the US Trade Representative to triple the tariff rates for Chinese steel and aluminum if Beijing was
Beijing is continuing to commit genocide and crimes against humanity against Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities in its western Xinjiang province, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in a report published on Monday, ahead of his planned visit to China this week. The State Department’s annual human rights report, which documents abuses recorded all over the world during the previous calendar year, repeated language from previous years on the treatment of Muslims in Xinjiang, but the publication raises the issue ahead of delicate talks, including on the war in Ukraine and global trade, between the top U.S. diplomat and Chinese