Monitoring Global Poverty

Through 2017, the last year for which global data are available, extreme poverty reduction slowed compared with previous decades, continuing the trend reported in Poverty and Shared Prosperity 2018: Piecing Together the Poverty Puzzle (World Bank 2018). This deceleration alone would have made it hard to reach the 2030 target of 3 percent global poverty. Now, the COVID-19 (coronavirus) pandemic has reversed the gains in global poverty for the first time in a generation. This report estimates that this reversal of fortune is expected to push between 88 million and 115 million more people into extreme poverty in 2020. But COVID-19 is not the only reversal that threatens the poverty goals: confronting conflict and climate change will also be critical to putting poverty eradication back on track. Current estimates show that poverty rates are rising in the Middle East and North Africa, driven largely by economies affected by conflict. Moreover, recent estimates indicate that between 68 million and 132 million people could be pushed into poverty by 2030 because of the multiple impacts of climate change. In 2018, the World Bank presented poverty lines at US$3.20 a day and US$5.50 a day to reflect national poverty lines in lower-middle-income and upper-middle-income countries, respectively, which underscore that poverty eradication is far from attained once the extreme poverty threshold of US$1.90 a day has been reached. In South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa, poverty reduction against these lines has been slower than at the extreme poverty line, suggesting that many people have barely escaped extreme poverty. The societal poverty line (SPL), which increases with a country’s level of income, leads to similar conclusions: 2 billion people are still poor by this definition. Poverty reduction has been too slow in Sub-Saharan Africa for global poverty to reach the 2030 goal. Some economies in the region have made gains, but high poverty rates persist in too many. Sub-Saharan Africa faces high levels of multidimensional poverty with high overlaps across the different dimensions, suggesting that nonmonetary deprivations are compounding monetary poverty. Extreme poverty is predicted to become increasingly concentrated in the region. Monitoring Global Poverty