With almost 600 million people across the world likely to have to make do with less than US$2.15 per day by year 2030, the globally touted progress in reducing extreme poverty is quite likely to grind to a shuddering halt by 2030 according to the World Bank’s recently released latest Poverty and Shared Prosperity Report.
The Bank’s assessment which will doubtless heap more woes on poor countries which, even now, are intimate with acute food shortages and their dire consequences, states that there is little if any chance of arriving at what it describes as the ‘history-defying rates of economic growth” over the remainder of the decade that it will take to arrive at the envisaged goal.
This goal, the Bank’s recent report suggests, has been severely scuttled by the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic and more recently by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and more particularly by the consequences deriving from the latter for the distribution of global food and oil supplies.
The Report, described as “the first comprehensive look at the global landscape of poverty in the aftermath of the extraordinary series of shocks to the global economy over the past few years,” estiaresulted in about 70 million people being pushed into poverty and that an estimated 719 million people subsisted on less than $2.15 a day by the end of 2020.
The World Bank group’s president, David Malpass, is quoted as saying that “progress in reducing extreme poverty has essentially halted in tandem with subdued global economic growth,” and that one of the Bank’s key concerns is with “the rise in extreme poverty and decline of shared prosperity brought by inflation, currency depreciations, and broader overlapping crises facing development.” This, the World Bank head says, “means a grim outlook for billions of people globally.”
Malpass believes that “adjustments of macroeconomic policies are needed to improve the allocation of global capital, foster currency stability, reduce inflation, and restart growth in median income. The alternative is the status quo – slowing global growth, higher interest rates, greater risk aversion, and fragility in many developing countries.”
The recent World Bank report sees 2020 as a “historic turning point,” a juncture at which the poorest people bore the steepest costs of the pandemic. The report says that while the wealthiest countries managed to fully offset COVID-19’s impact on poverty through fiscal policy and other emergency support measures, developing economies had fewer resources and therefore spent less and achieved less.”
“Over the next decade, investing in better health and education will be crucial for developing economies, given the severe learning losses and health-related setbacks they suffered during the pandemic,” the World Bank’s Chief Economist Indermit Gill is quoted as saying.
According to the report, Sub-Saharan Africa now accounts for 60 per cent of all people in extreme poverty – 389 million – more than any other region.
