Chart: Poverty rates fell sharply in the new millennium

Excerpt from “Tracking the MDGs,” GMR 2012.

Poverty and hunger remain, but fewer people live in extreme poverty. The proportion of people living on less than $1.25 a day fell from 43.1 percent in 1990 to 22.2 percent in 2008. While the food, fuel, and financial crises over the past four years have worsened the situations of vulnerable populations and slowed the rate of poverty reduction in some countries, global poverty rates kept falling. Between 2005 and 2008 both the poverty rate and the number of people living in extreme poverty fell in all six developing regions, the first time that has happened. Preliminary estimates for 2010 show that the extreme poverty rate fell further, reaching the global target of the MDGs of halving world poverty five years early. Three regions—East Asia and Pacific, Europe and Central Asia,and the Middle East and North Africa—met or exceeded the target by 2008. More