Factoid: WB Predicts Poverty Below 10%

The World Bank is predicting that the proportion of the world's population living in extreme poverty will drop to 9.6% by the end of 2015. As they put it:

 The Bank uses an updated international poverty line of US $1.90 a day, which incorporates new information on differences in the cost of living across countries (the PPP exchange rates). 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. Using this new line (as well as new country-level data on living standards), the World Bank projects that global poverty will have fallen from 902 million people or 12.8 per cent of the global population in 2012 to 702 million people, or 9.6 per cent of the global population, this year.

 The WB's press release is a bit awkward, so you might want to see the BBC's summary of the report.

While poverty is decreasing in all regions, the WB's report notes that the concentration of poverty has shifted from East Asia to Sub-Saharan Africa. In their words:

For the last several decades, three regions, East Asia and Pacific, South Asia, and Sub-Saharan Africa, have accounted for some 95 percent of global poverty. Yet, the composition of poverty across these three regions has shifted dramatically. In 1990, East Asia accounted for half of the global poor, whereas some 15 percent lived in in Sub-Saharan Africa; by 2015 forecasts, this is almost exactly reversed: Sub-Saharan Africa accounts for half of the global poor, with some 12 percent living in East Asia. Poverty is declining in all regions but it is becoming deeper and more entrenched in countries that are either conflict ridden or overly dependent on commodity exports.

Of course, the underlying story here is that the economic growth in China and India has moved hundreds of millions of people out of extreme poverty in the past decades while not much has stirred in Africa.