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World poverty reduced by growth in India and China

Larry Elliott

Numbers of the extremely poor fell from 1.489 billion in 1981 to 986 million in 2004.

SPECTACULAR GROWTH in China and India has pushed the number of people around the world living on less than a dollar a day below the 1 billion level, but masks entrenched poverty in Africa and Latin America, the World Bank said on Sunday. Reporting an 80-million drop in extreme poverty in the two years to 2004, it said this was entirely due to the rapid expansion in Asia's two most populous countries.

It said that since 1990, there had been a 260-million drop in the number of people living on less than a dollar a day, but this was more than accounted for by the 300 million taken out of extreme poverty in China. In sub-Saharan Africa, extreme poverty had risen by 60 million, the Bank said."The Millennium Development Goal of halving the proportion of poor people is still within reach at the worldwide level, with a projected decline from 29 per cent to 10 per cent between 1990 and 2015," the Bank said in its annual report, World Development Indicators.

The Bank's data show that the number of people in extreme poverty has fallen from 1.489 billion in 1981 to 986 million in 2004. Excluding China, however, there has been no improvement: the total rose from 855 million in 1981 to 857 million in 2004. Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa both have more people living on less than a dollar a day than they did at the start of the 1980s.

-Guardian Newspapers Limited 2007

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