Contrary to the situation in other parts of the world, where the number of poor people has declined, Nigeria and other sub-Saharan African countries currently account for half of the global poor.
This is according to the World Bank, which stated in a new report released on Sunday that for the last several decades, East Asia and Pacific, South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa had accounted for some 95 per cent of global poverty.
However, the bank stated in its Policy Research Note entitled: ‘Ending Extreme Poverty and Sharing Prosperity: Progress and Policies’ that the composition of poverty across the three regions had shifted dramatically.
The bank said in a statement, “In 1990, East Asia accounted for half of the global poor, whereas some 15 per cent lived in sub-Saharan Africa; by 2015 forecasts, this is almost exactly reversed: sub-Saharan Africa accounts for half of the global poor, with some 12 per cent living in East Asia. Poverty is declining in all regions but it is becoming deeper and more entrenched in countries that are either conflict-ridden or overly dependent on commodity exports.
“The growing concentration of global poverty in sub-Saharan Africa is of great concern. While some African countries have seen significant successes in reducing poverty, the region as a whole lags the rest of the world in the pace of lessening poverty. Sub-Saharan poverty fell from an estimated 56 per cent in 1990 to a projected 35 per cent in 2015. Rapid population growth remains a key factor blunting progress in many countries—as this year’s Global Monitoring Report to be launched on October 8 shows.”
In its regional forecasts for 2015, the bank said that poverty in East Asia and the Pacific would fall to 4.1 per cent of its population, down from 7.2 per cent in 2012; Latin America and the Caribbean would fall to 5.6 per cent from 6.2 in 2012; South Asia would fall to 13.5 per cent in 2015, compared to 18.8 per cent in 2012; Sub-Saharan Africa declines to 35.2 per cent in 2015, compared to 42.6 per cent in 2012.
Reliable current poverty data is not available for the Middle East and North Africa because of conflict and fragility in key countries in the region, the bank stated.
The World Bank Chief Economist and a former Chief Economic Adviser to the Indian Government, Kaushik Basu, said, “Development has been robust over the last two decades but the protracted global slowdown since the financial crisis of 2008 is beginning to cast its shadow on emerging economies.
“There is some turbulence ahead. The economic growth outlook is less impressive for emerging economies in the near future, which will create new challenges in the fight to end poverty and attend to the needs of the vulnerable, especially those living at the bottom 40 per cent of their societies.”
However, the report predicted that the number of people living in extreme poverty around the world was likely to fall to under 10 per cent of the global population this year, giving fresh evidence that a quarter-century-long sustained reduction in poverty was moving the world closer to the historic goal of ending poverty by 2030.
The bank uses an updated international poverty line of $1.90 a day, which incorporates new information on differences in the cost of living across countries. The new line preserves the real purchasing power of the previous line (of $1.25 a day in 2005 prices) in the world’s poorest countries.
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