World Bank renews drive against inequality
Report says faster growth and more anti-inequality measures would be needed to meet goal of eliminating extreme poverty and boosting pay.
The World Bank has called for a fresh drive to tackle inequality after warning that the gap between rich and poor risks thwarting its ambition of eliminating extreme poverty by 2030.
Ahead of its annual meeting with the IMF in Washington DC this week, the Bank said that the number of people living on less than $1.90 a day the accepted benchmark for extreme poverty had continued to fall despite the sluggishness of the global economy in the years after the financial crisis.
But it said faster growth and a range of anti-inequality measures would be needed to meet the twin goals set by its president, Jim Yong Kim: reducing poverty from just under 11% of the global population to 3% and boosting the incomes of the bottom 40% of the population in each country.
In the first edition of a new annual study Poverty and Shared Prosperity which will track trends in global poverty, the Bank said the number of people living on less than $1.90 a day had fallen by 100 million to 767 million between 2012 and 2013, the latest year for which comprehensive data is available.
Its remarkable that countries have continued to reduce poverty and boost shared prosperity at a time when the global economy is underperforming but still far too many people live with far too little, said Kim.
Unless we can resume faster global growth and reduce inequality, we risk missing our World Bank target of ending extreme poverty by 2030. The message is clear: to end poverty, we must make growth work for the poorest, and one of the surest ways to do that is to reduce high inequality, especially in those countries where many poor people live.
Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2016/oct/02/world-bank-renews-drive-against-inequality-imf