Poverty Decreases Sharply in Developing World: UN
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The developing world’s rapid growth has sharply cut extreme poverty and by 2030, up to 80 percent of the world’s middle class will be from developing countries, said a United Nations report published on Thursday.
According to the world body, higher economic growth in at least 40 developing countries has help lift hundreds of millions of people from poverty, and pushed billions more into a new global middle class.
The developing world’s rapid growth has sharply cut extreme poverty and by 2030, up to 80 percent of the world’s middle class will be from developing countries, said a United Nations report published on Thursday.
According to the world body, higher economic growth in at least 40 developing countries has help lift hundreds of millions of people from poverty, and pushed billions more into a new global middle class.
The most striking changes however had occurred in the southern hemisphere, a region which it said had seen an “unprecedented” rise in living standards.
In an interview with the Financial Times, Helen Clark, UN Development Programme administrator, called the progress an “incredible success of emerging markets”, praising them for accompanying faster rates of economic growth with pragmatic policies to help the poor.
Clark said:
[quote] These countries opened up to foreign direct investment and prioritised infrastructure but also invested in their people. They targeted education and health, and put social floors in place. [/quote]
In its latest Human Development Report, the UN said the proportion of people living in extreme poverty worldwide fell from 43 percent in 1990 to 22 percent in 2008, with more than 500,000 million being lifted out of poverty in China alone.
Such gains helped to meet one of the key targets of the Millennium Development Goal, which called for the share of people living on less than $1.25 a day to be cut by half from 1990 to 2015.
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Underpinning this poverty reduction was developing countries’ increasing share of global trade, which grew from 25 percent to 47 percent between 1980 and 2010. “The south as a whole is driving global economic growth and societal change for the first time in centuries,” said the report.
The southern hemisphere’s share of the global middle class grew from 26 percent to 58 percent between 1990 and 2010. By 2030, more than 80 percent of the world’s middle class will live south of the Equator, the report said, giving the South new importance to the world economy.
“All groups and regions have seen notable improvement in all HDI (human development index) components, with faster progress in low and medium HDI countries,” the report added. “On this basis, the world is becoming less unequal.”
“Never in history have the living conditions and prospects of so many people changed so dramatically and so fast,” the report concluded. “The world is witnessing an epochal ‘global rebalancing’,” it said, adding that the combined economic output of Brazil, China and India will surpass that of the United States, Canada, Britain, France, Germany and Italy by 2020.
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Lead author of the report, Khalid Malik, said:
[quote] The Industrial Revolution was a story of perhaps a hundred million people, but this is a story about billions of people. [/quote]
