Poverty and Shared Prosperity Report 2022

October 8, 2022

The World Bank’s report titled “Poverty and Shared Prosperity 2022: Correcting Course” provides the first comprehensive assessment of the COVID-19 pandemic’s impact on poverty in developing countries.

Key findings

The report projected that the world is unlikely to end the extreme poverty by 2030 because of the economic shocks caused by the COVID-19 pandemic and the Russian war in Ukraine.
The pandemic has overturned decades of poverty alleviation efforts, with over 71 million more people pushed in extreme poverty in 2020. This means that over 719 million people (9.3% of global population) were living in extreme poverty.
This is the highest one-year spike since the monitoring started in 1990.
Extreme poverty is defined as the number of people living on less than $2.15 or Rs.177 per day.
The on-going crisis in Ukraine, reduced economic growth in China and energy and food inflation are threatening to disrupt the poverty alleviation efforts.
Without significant economic progress, around 574 million people (about 7 per cent of the global population) will still face extreme poverty by the end of this decade. These people will be mainly concentrated in Africa.
The report also found widening of wealth gap, with 40 per cent of the poorest population facing an average income loss of 4 per cent during the pandemic. This is twice as much the losses faced by the wealthiest 20 per cent.
While the government spending and emergency aids have minimized the poverty rates, the economic recovery has been uneven, with poorer economies having limited resources saw little positive results due to funding constraints.
Currently, the extreme poverty is concentrated in sub-Saharan Africa, where over 60 per cent of the population is in extreme poverty.

Poverty in India

Since 2011, the Indian government has stopped releasing official data on poverty. Hence, the World Bank’s report used the findings of Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy’s (CMIE’s) Consumer Pyramids Household Survey (CPHS). According to the CPHS, 5.6 crore people in India have slipped into poverty in 2020. This is higher than the World Bank’s previous estimates of 2.3 crore additional Indians slipping into poverty in 2020.

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