India got about $15.25 per poor person Nigeria, $28.90. India and Nigeria, the countries with the two largest populations of extreme poor in the world, received nearly the lowest net aid per poor person among all aid-receiving countries in 2016. From 2013 to 2015, total employment in India, for instance, shrank by seven million, more than Illinois’s entire civilian labor force of 6.5 million.Īid doesn’t reach the majority of the poor because the middle-income countries they live in either never received much or have outgrown eligibility. Now, manufacturing is on the decline and automation is spreading in rich and poor countries. This growth was rooted in low-skilled laborers moving out of agriculture and into manufacturing industries bolstered by high global demand and trade. But poverty reduction propelled by economic growth, as in China, may also be running out of steam.
But by 2015 only four out of 10 lived in low-income countries, while the rest lived in middle-income countries, over half of them in India, Nigeria, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Kenya, Yemen, South Africa, China, Pakistan and Zambia.Ĭonflict, inequality and weak institutions may cause growth to reverse, as in Yemen, which since 2015 has slipped from the ranks of middle-income countries.
In 1987, nine out of 10 extremely poor people generally lived in low-income countries. This has created two concentrations of poverty in the world.
This redirection of global aid risks neglecting the hundreds of millions who may never escape poverty despite living in countries that are becoming relatively rich.īill and Melinda Gates, whose yearly contributions to international development exceed the aid budgets of countries like Canada and Norway, have argued that “as extreme poverty disappears from many places, including China and India and, increasingly, many countries in Africa, it gets more and more concentrated in the most challenging places in the world” - mainly in sub-Saharan Africa.īritain in 2015 committed to devoting 50 percent of its aid to “ fragile states and regions.” And the 2017 replenishment of the International Development Association, the World Bank’s fund for least-developed countries, doubled the bank’s financing for such countries to $14 billion over three years.ĭata released by the World Bank in September shows that the rate of extreme-poverty reduction is slowing down, from an average of one percentage point per year from 1981 to 2013 to 0.6 percentage points per year between 20 and below half a percentage point per year since.Ĭhina, India, Nigeria and several other countries still have huge populations of poor people and have become more unequal as they have grown. The reduction was driven in large part by the fast-growing economies of Asia, in particular, China and India.īut decline of poverty in those countries has fed an erroneous belief in the West that economies rising into middle-income status are on track to end extreme poverty and no longer need assistance - and that major donors need to focus on the fragile and conflict-ridden countries left behind. Poverty fell not only proportionally but in absolute terms as well: The number of people in extreme poverty fell by 1.17 billion between 19, even as the global population grew by almost three billion. The share of the world’s population in extreme poverty - subsisting on less than $1.90 a day, adjusted for inflation and cost of living across countries - has plummeted from 42 percent in 1981 to 10 percent in 2015. © 2009 Mohammad Rakibul Hasan, Courtesy of Photoshare
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