Nations must interact to reverse setbacks to poverty reduction: WB
Reversing setbacks to poverty reduction requires nations to interact for a resilient recovery, according to a fresh World Bank (WB) report.
The poverty and shared prosperity series offers a global audience with the most recent and most accurate estimates on trends in global poverty and shared prosperity. For more than two decades, extreme poverty was steadily declining. Now, for the very first time in a generation, the quest to get rid of poverty has suffered its worst setback, reports UNB.
The poverty and shared prosperity 2020: Reversals of fortune provides new data and analysis on the complexities and consequences of the reversal and identifies policy principles countries may use to counter it.
The report presents new estimates of COVID-19's impacts on global poverty and inequality.
Harnessing fresh data from frontline surveys and monetary simulations, it implies that pandemic-related job losses and deprivation worldwide are hitting already-poor and vulnerable people hard, while also partly changing the profile of global poverty by creating millions of "new poor."
Furthermore, the report breaks ground by jointly analyzing three factors whose convergence is driving the existing crisis and will extend its impact in to the future: the COVID-19 pandemic, armed conflict, and climate change.
Global Goals, Shared Challenges
While important gains in reducing global poverty have already been made steadily since 1998, the pace of this reduction had slowed considerably in recent years. It was becoming more and more unrealistic to anticipate that the goal of reducing extreme poverty to below 3 percent would be attained at the global level by 2030, unless there was a widespread and sustained improvement in inclusive monetary growth.
Unprecedented degrees of global prosperity are threatened by three global forces that are intertwined, aggregating and reinforcing one another: a pandemic (associated with an economical crisis), armed conflict, and climate change.
Poverty
Through 2017, the this past year that global data can be found, extreme poverty reduction slowed weighed against previous decades. This deceleration alone could have made it hard to reach the 2030 target of 3 percent global poverty.
Now, the COVID-19 (coronavirus) pandemic has reversed the gains in global poverty for the very first time in a generation. By most estimates, this reversal of fortune is likely to push between 88 million and 115 million more persons into extreme poverty in 2020.
But COVID-19 is not the only reversal that threatens the poverty goals: Confronting conflict and climate change may also be critical to putting poverty eradication back on the right track.
Shared prosperity
Shared prosperity targets the poorest 40 percent of a population and is defined as the annualized growth rate of their mean household per capita income or consumption.
The shared prosperity premium may be the difference between this and the annualized growth rate for your population. Shared prosperity and the shared prosperity premium are essential indicators of inclusion and well-being in virtually any country and correlate with reductions in poverty and inequality.
An initial outlook provides evidence that the global COVID-19 pandemic would reduce shared prosperity and the shared prosperity premium with the likely consequence, based on the patterns of shared prosperity from modern times, of increases in poverty and inequality soon.
Conflict, climate risks and COVID-19
A lot more than 40 percent of the global poor are in economies damaged by conflict and violence, and, in a few economies, most of the poor are concentrated in specific areas.
About 132 million of the global poor live in areas with high flood risk. Moreover, lots of the poor face contact with multiple risks. In a number of countries, a sizable share of the indegent reside in areas that are both damaged by conflict and face high exposure to floods.
Facing the COVID-19 pandemic, many of the new poor will probably stay in congested urban settings and also to work in the sectors most afflicted by lockdowns and mobility restrictions; most are engaged in informal services rather than reached by existing social safety nets. Conflict, climate change, and COVID-19 are experiencing a clear impact on the global poor, oftentimes compounding the challenges of those living in poverty.
Navigating tough terrain
The existing moment of crisis is extraordinary. No prior disease has become a global threat so quickly as COVID-19. Do not have the world's poorest persons resided so disproportionately in conflict-affected territories and countries. Changes in global weather patterns induced by human activity are unprecedented.
The report provides tips for a complementary two-track approach: responding effectively to the urgent crisis in the short run while continuing to concentrate on foundational development problems, including conflict and climate change.
