World Bank says India’s poverty rate lowest among nations with poor populations

A latest World Bank report has revealed that India accounted for the largest number of poor people in any country in 2012, but its poverty rate was lowest among countries having large number of poor population.

The report has also stated that the number of poor people across the world is likely to go down by 10% of the global population this year.

It, however, indicates that the world is moving closer to its goal of ending poverty by 2030. The poverty rate in low-income countries was on an average of 43% in 2012, while in middle-income-countries, it was 19%. Still the lower-middle-income countries are home to about half of the global poor as compared to a third for low-income countries.

What experts believe is that four nations – China, India, Indonesia and Nigeria – with the largest populations were once classified as low-income nations, but these have now moved into lower-middle-income category.

In its report, the bank used an updated international poverty line of $1.9 a day, which incorporates new information on differences in the cost of living across countries. The new line preserves the real purchasing power of the previous line (of $1.25 a day in 2005 prices) in the world's poorest countries.

The World Bank president Jim Yong Kim said, “This is the best story in the world today - these projections show us that we are the first generation in human history that can end extreme poverty."

The major reductions in poverty were because of strong growth rates in developing countries, investment in people’s education, health and social safety nets that helped people from falling back into poverty, said Kim.

The regional forecast for 2015 shows that the poverty in East Asia and the Pacific would fall to 4.1% of its population, down from 7.2% in 2012; Latin America and the Caribbean would fall to 5.6% from 6.2% in 2012, as reported by The Economic Times.

In South Asia, the poverty would scale down to 13.5% in 2015 as against 18.8% in 2012; sub-Saharan Africa poverty would decline to 35.2% in 2015 as compared to 42.6% in 2012.

Kaushik Basu, the former chief Economic Advisor to the Indian Government and the chief economist of the World Bank, said, "Development has been robust over the last two decades but the protracted global slowdown since the financial crisis of 2008, is beginning to cast its shadow on emerging economies."

Kim said the continued major reductions in poverty were due to strong growth rates in developing countries in recent years, investments in people's education, health and social safety nets that helped keep people from falling back into poverty.

He, however, cautioned that the goal to end extreme poverty remained a highly-ambitious target owing to slow global economic growth, many of the world's remaining poor people living in fragile and conflict-affected states and the considerable depth and breadth of remaining poverty.
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