1.4bn people live on less than $1.25 a day

A new data released by the International Comparison Programme (ICP) in Washington on Tuesday by the World Bank has shown that 1.4billion people in developing countries live on less than a US$1.25 a day, an almost 400million increase over the previous record of 985million recorded in 2004.
Sub-Saharan Africa according to the report is the least successful region in reducing poverty among developing countries, maintaining its 50% feat recorded in 1981.
Africa has since 1981 doubled in terms of population and the depth of poverty continues to rise. The report therefore warned that efforts must be redoubled in the region (Africa) to save it from further decline.
The new report surpassed an earlier estimate of 985 million people living below the former international US$1 a day poverty line in 2004 which was based on then best available cost of living data from 1993.
From the report, one in four in the developing countries was living below US$1.25 a day in 2005, down from one in two in 1981. The new poverty line of US$1.25 a day for 2005 is the average national poverty line for the poorest 10-20 countries.
“The new estimates are a major advance in poverty measurement because they are based on far better price data for assuring that the poverty lines are comparable across countries”, noted Martin Ravallion, Director of the Development Research Group at the World Bank.
The report dubbed “The developing world is poorer than we thought but no less successful in the fight against poverty” indicated that the future looks bright in curbing the canker even though there were more poor people around the world than previously thought.
“The new data confirm that the world will likely reach the first Millennium Development Goal of halving the 1990 level of poverty by 2015 and that poverty has fallen by about 1percentage point a year since 1981. However, the sobering news that poverty is more pervasive than we thought means we must redouble our efforts, especially in Sub-Saharan Africa”, said Justin Lin, Chief Economist and Senior Vice President, Development Economics at the World Bank.
The new data showed that marked differences in progress against poverty persist. East Asia’s poverty line dropped from nearly 80 percent of the population living below US$1.25 a day in 1981 to 18% in 2005.
The report is the first major effort to update poverty data based on 2005 measures of purchasing power parity. Estimates were also based on data from 675 household surveys across 116 developing countries. Over 1.2 million randomly sampled households were interviewed for the 2005 estimate, representing 96% of the developing world.