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Projecting global extreme poverty up to 2030: How close are we to World Bank’s 3% goal? [1]

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Date: 2025-05

Note that even the pre-COVID-19 scenario is well short of the 3% target for 2030. In order to reach this target, each economy, starting in 2021, would have to grow at a much higher rate than their annual historical growth rates used for Figure 1. In a world without the COVID-19 pandemic, the required annual growth rate to reach the World Bank’s 2030 goal was 7%; with COVID-19, the required growth rates have been pushed even higher, between 8% and 8.5%. This would imply, for instance for Sub-Saharan Africa, growth rates that are more than five times the region’s historical growth rates.

The discussion so far assumes distribution-neutral growth. Lowering inequality could help reduce poverty. A 2% decrease in the Gini index per year, which is not uncommon year-to-year but rather uncommon to be sustained annually for 10 years, would bring the 2030 projected global poverty rate to between 4.7% and 5% (under the COVID-19 scenarios). However, if inequality increased within countries due to the pandemic, global poverty in 2030 could rise to between 8.2% and 8.6% (if Gini index increased by 1% annually) or between 11.3% and 11.8% (if Gini index increased by 2% annually).

Regions have grown at various speeds over the last few decades. This has impacted the level and the rate of reduction of poverty for these regions. In Figure 2, we show the breakdown of the global number of poor by region starting in 1990. Historical numbers are presented up to 2018 and projected numbers thereafter. While East Asia and Pacific had the highest number of poor in the 1990s, the region’s high growth rates contributed significantly to reducing extreme poverty for the world. By 2002, East Asia and Pacific had reduced their number of poor to below the level observed in South Asia. South Asia followed suit and by 2011, the region had decreased their 2002 poverty level by 39%. From then on, studying poverty in South Asia is challenging due to lack of recent data for India. With our current extrapolations for South Asia, in the same year, Sub-Saharan Africa became the region with the most extreme poor. Whereas poverty continued to fall in most regions, this was not the case in Sub-Saharan Africa. For this region, a combination of population growth and conflict have hindered poverty reduction goals. In 2018, the region had an estimated 433 million living in extreme poverty. If the lack of growth in the region over the past decade is replicated for the next decade, we expect the number of poor to increase in the region to between 443 million (baseline) and 477 million (downside). Regardless of the scenario, by 2030 Sub-Saharan Africa will be home to the lion's share of the world’s poor, and the global poverty goal can only come within reach if poverty is reduced in the African continent.

Figure 2: Number of Extreme Poor (millions) by Region, 1990-2030

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[1] Url: https://blogs.worldbank.org/opendata/projecting-global-extreme-poverty-2030-how-close-are-we-world-banks-3-goal

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