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The outlook on poverty has not changed since last year’s GMR: On current trends, if the developing world can sustain the growth momentum of the past 15 years it will be able to reduce the share of the population living in extreme poverty—i.e., living on less than $1 a day—by half between 1990 and 2015.

It is projected that this share will fall from 27.9 percent in 1990 to 10.2 percent in 2015. By 2002, it had already dropped to 21.7 percent.

There are however broad regional discrepancies:

• Sub-Saharan Africa’s poverty rate is 44 percent, virtually the same as 1990, if significantly lower than the 2001 level of 46.4 percent. That rate is projected to remain above 38 percent in 2015—far above the 22.3 percent target.
• In three regions, the rate has likely declined since 2002 by two to four percentage points—a projected 8.8 percent in East Asia/Pacific, 27.5 percent in South Asia, and 41.4 percent in Sub-Saharan Africa. East and South Asia will likely reach the poverty MDG.
• In other regions—Europe and Central Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean, and North Africa and the Middle East—where initial poverty rates were lower, poverty likely dropped by less than 1 percentage point between 2002 and 2005.

The reduction in the global poverty rate is driven by advances in China and India, but it also has been helped by acceleration in income growth throughout the developing world in recent years—per capita GDP growth in low-income countries was higher in 2005 than the average for any five-year period since the late 1970s, and the strong growth is expected to continue.

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