Decline of Poverty Has Slowed

Around 8.5 percent of the world’s population currently live in extreme poverty, according to a new report by the World Bank titled Poverty, Prosperity and Planet 2024: Pathways Out of the Polycrisis. This equates to roughly 692 million people living on less than $2.15 per person per day. While this is a considerable improvement from the 37.9 percent that lived in extreme poverty in 1990, the pace of progress is slowing, with 2020-2030 feared to be a “lost decade”. This stagnation is the result of multiple overlapping issues, including slow economic growth, increased fragility, climate risks and heightened uncertainty.

The World Bank uses three different poverty lines, with $3.65 per person a day thought to be more relevant to lower-middle-income countries, while the $6.85 per person per day is generally used for populations in upper-middle-income countries. According to these categories, around 1.7 billion people (21.4 percent) or 3.5 billion people (43.6 percent) are estimated to be living in poverty in 2024, respectively. Although the share of people under $6.85 per day has declined since the 1990s, the actual number of people living under these circumstances has remained fairly similar due to population growth.

In South Asia, the share of people living in poverty increased more severely than the global average during the the pandemic. The share of South Asians living under $6.85 in 2024 is also well above the global average, at 75.6 percent versus the world’s 43.6 percent. That’s 1.48 billion people in South Asia, or roughly 42 percent of the global total (3.53 billion).

The writers of the report warn that if economic growth continues to remain slow and inequality is not tackled, the World Bank global goal of a maximum of only three percent of people living in extreme poverty will not be reached for decades. The report’s key message is that while aiming to reduce global poverty and to increase shared prosperity, it is crucial to take environmental costs into account.