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.