Society
2005
2015
Vietnam
ZAF
BDI
KEN
BFA
Zambia
Guinea
Haiti
PHL
Indonesia 47
MOZ
India 456
MEX
Pakistan
Bangladesh 33
CIV
Ethiopia
Benin
NPL
Angola
MWI
MOZ
RWA
Nigeria 96
ZAF
Chad
Bangladesh 76
DRC 48
MDG 17
DRC 38
China
Niger
NPL
Tanzania 31
CMR
Indonesia 34
Nigeria 102
PHL
India 88
Pakistan 35
COL
China 208
UGA
MLI
UGA
UZB
Tanzania 34
Brazil
Sub-Saharan Africa Latin America and Caribbean Middle East and North Africa
Europe and Central Asia East Asia and Pacific South Asia
MWI
Niger
MDG
(Millions of poor people)
Figure 5: The changing global poverty landscape Note: Numbers refer to individuals living below the international poverty line of USD $1.25 a day, figures rounded to the nearest million. The 2015 numbers are forecasts and for a number of countries the scale of improvement is indicative of the number of people clustered around the poverty line used in the figure. Source: Laurence Chandy and Geoffrey Gertz, Poverty in Numbers: The Changing State of Global Poverty from 2005-2015 (Washington DC: The Brookings Institution, 2011), p. 8.
Uneven and unequal
Africa 43 ), social exclusion persists (through unemployment, poverty or a lack of access to political, economic, educational or societal processes). 44 Exclusion hits the old, the young and women hardest, especially in developing countries. Gender inequality remains a key barrier to economic growth and poverty reduction. Women and girls account for six out of ten of the world’s poorest and two-thirds of the world’s illiterate people. According to the UNDP, women perform 66 percent of the world’s work, but earn just 10 percent of the income and own only 1 percent of the property. 45
countries such as China, India, Russia and South Africa, it is widening rapidly. 40
For the past three decades, there has been a steady decline in poverty rates in the developing world. As highlighted in Figure 5, this progress is anticipated to continue, not least in countries such as China and India. Yet the contrast between rich and poor remains stark. Despite overall progress on education, three out of every four illiterate adults are located in just ten countries (37 percent of them in India) 37 and about half of all out-of-school children are in sub-Saharan Africa. 38 According to the World Bank, more than 1.2 billion people do not have access to electricity, including 550 million in Africa and 400 million in India. 39 Societies and individuals are becoming increasingly unequal. The Gini coefficient – an imperfect measure of the gap between the richest and poorest – has risen by more than 10 percent in OECD countries since 1992. In some emerging
Generational and gender divides
One third of the world’s labour force began 2012 poor or unemployed; global unemployment is expected to remain over 200 million until at least 2015. According to the ILO, over the past five years long-term unemployment has increased in 60 percent of advanced and developing countries where there is available data. 41 Young people are 3–4 times more likely to be without a job: the global youth unemployment rate (12.6 percent) is more than double the unemployment rate of the labour force as a whole. 42 While there has been solid progress on reducing extreme poverty (by 2050 it might only remain a concern in India and sub-Saharan
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