Extreme poverty has been falling steadily around the world, but eliminating it by 2030 could be stymied by unequal distribution of the gains of economic growth, the World Bank said Sunday. Unless the gains of growth are steered better to those at the bottom of a country's economy, they could be left behind, warned the inaugural "Poverty and Shared Prosperity" report.
The report said gains particularly in China, India and Indonesia have led to a dramatic reduction in global poverty. In 2013 - the latest year with comprehensive data - some 767 million people were living below the global poverty threshold of $1.90 per day.
While still a high number, that was 10.7 percent of the world's population, compared to 12.4 percent the year earlier.
"The world had almost 1.1 billion fewer poor in 2013 than in 1990, a period in which the world population grew by almost 1.9 billion people," the report said. The biggest concentration remains in sub-Saharan Africa, with 41 percent of people mired in utter poverty, many of them rural based with little access to education. In South Asia, the figure is 15.1 percent; Latina America and the Caribbean, 5.4 percent; and East Asia and the Pacific, 3.5 percent.
But it warned that gains in the future will be much tougher to achieve, in part because of the unexpectedly slow growth of the global economy, and because extreme poverty is being exacerbated by conflicts in the Middle East and Africa.
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