Poverty in Developing World is Declining

Recent estimates of measures of absolute poverty in the developing world shows that there is uneven progress across regions. A significant reduction in poverty was seen in East Asia, particularly in China. The study was conducted by Shaohua Chen and Martin Ravallion of the World Bank and used household survey and national accounts (NAS) data during the1981 to 2004 period.

The researchers computed that by 2004, only 9.9 percent of the population was living below one dollar a day, a significant decrease from 17.77 percent during the previous years. The same trend was observed in the Middle East and South Asia. Countries in the sub-Saharan Africa, on the other hand, have seen little or no sustained progress in reducing the number of poor over the years. The study also revealed that there is an increasing urbanization of poverty. The urban share of the poor is rising over time, from 19% in 1993 to 25% in 2002. The World Bank’s global poverty measures have been based mainly on an international poverty line of approximately one dollar a day.

Read the full paper at http://www.pnas.org/cgi/reprint/104/43/16757. The PNAS journal issue also features other articles on poverty and hunger.