The proportion of human beings living on the margin of subsistence is estimated to have fallen from close to 80 per cent in 1820 to just under 10 per cent in 2018. What makes this decline even more remarkable is that the global population rose from 1bn in 1820 to 7.7bn in 2018. Rising prosperity has also helped double global life expectancy to 71 years. In brief, we have moved from a world in which life was, for the great majority, indeed “nasty, brutish, and short” to something altogether better.
As recently as 1970, the rate of “extreme poverty” was still 50 per cent. This extraordinarily rapid recent reduction in the proportion of people living in extreme poverty is due to the huge progress in the much reviled age of economic globalisation. I will never regret this achievement. It shows that the combination of global economic opportunity with external assistance worked.
A crucial source of the latter has been credits from the International Development Association. Contrary to what many feared, ending extreme poverty was not like trying to fill a “bottomless pit”. As a recent report from the World Bank, The Great Reversal, notes, South Korea, China and India were once beneficiaries of IDA credits: 60 years ago, IDA was even informally known as the “Indian Development Association”. Progress has been remarkable and still is: life expectancy in IDA countries rose from 58 to 65 years between 2000 and 2021.
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We risk a lost decade for the world’s poor: Covid, post-Covid inflation, war-induced spikes in energy and food prices and rising interest rates had dire effects and ‘the risk of a lost decade, or perhaps something even worse.’ @FT
https://t.co/U9G0n5GPOv— Monica Araya (@MonicaArayaTica) April 30, 2024