East Asia on track to halve poverty: WB

East Asia on track to halve poverty: WB

Agence France-Presse, Nusa Dua, Bali

East Asian countries are on track to meet their millennium development goals, including halving poverty by 2015, despite a setback suffered during the 1997-98 regional economic crisis, the World Bank says.

Gross domestic product per capita rose by 75 percent during the 1990s and the goal of halving the incidence of extreme poverty has already been met, a World Bank official said at the fifth Asia-Europe finance ministers' meeting here at the weekend.

Those living below one dollar a day have fallen from around 30 percent to around 15 percent by the end of the 1990s, Jemal-ud- din Kassum, the World Bank vice president for Asia and the Pacific, told the meeting.

"There was no perceptible progress in Latin America and the Middle East and North Africa, and absolute poverty increased in Europe and Central Asia and in Sub-Saharan Africa," Kassum said in a paper presented at the meeting.

There has been a substantial reduction in poverty in South Asia in large part due to the much stronger growth by India during the 1990s, he said.

The Millennium Development Goals are the result of the Millennium Declaration adopted by 189 countries at the UN Millennium Summit in September 2000.

They include halving the number of people whose income is less than one dollar a day and those who suffer from hunger between 1990 and 2015. Other goals stress the need for environmental sustainability and a global partnership.

East Asia's policy performance has continued to strengthen and is generally stronger than other developing countries, Kassum said.

"In particular macroeconomic and fiscal performance has strengthened considerably in the region following the East Asian crisis," he said.

China and Vietnam have experienced the most dramatic fall in poverty, with the number of people living on less than two dollars a day falling from 70 percent in 1990 to less than 40 percent in 2002 and from 90 percent to 60 percent respectively.

Kassum warned that despite progress, there remained major problems with poverty in East Asia. More than 200 million East Asians live on less than one dollar a day and more than 700 million on less than two dollars.

"One consequence of the very rapid decline in absolute poverty is that there are also large numbers living just above the poverty line," he said.

"Further, the remaining pools of poverty may also be more concentrated and difficult to address, for example because of concentration in remote regions or because of difficult social issues."

East Asia is also broadly on track to meet the goal on universal primary education, with enrollments already comparable to many high-income countries, he said.

However, progress on child health has been slower. The region is not on track to cut the infant mortality rate by two-thirds, Kassum said.