A century of extreme poverty: five facts from 1950 to 2050

1. The world has made remarkable progress in reducing extreme poverty in the past 75 years. Between 1950 and 2025, the world has experienced remarkable progress in reducing the proportion of the population living in extreme poverty from 60 percent to 10 percent. Consider the lifetime of someone in their 70s today. When they were born, six out of ten people were living in extreme poverty globally. Today, one out of ten people are living in extreme poverty. The world has made remarkable progress in reducing extreme poverty over the past 75 years, despite the global population more than tripling (from 2.5 billion to 8.3 billion). Today, more than 800 million people are living in extreme poverty; that is, they live on less than $3.00 a day (2021 PPP). The changing patterns in reducing extreme poverty are driven by a few regions in the world. Extreme poverty has been consistently low in Europe, North America, and Latin America since 1990; rapid progress against extreme poverty is explained by East Asia and the Pacific and South Asia, while the recent stagnation is driven by Sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East and North Africa. 2. The changing patterns in reducing extreme poverty are driven by a few regions in the world. Extreme poverty has been consistently low in Europe, North America, and Latin America since 1990; rapid progress against extreme poverty is explained by East Asia and the Pacific and South Asia, while the recent stagnation is driven by Sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East and North Africa. 3. China and India are major drivers of the global success story of reducing extreme poverty. China (in East Asia) and India (in South Asia) two countries driving most of the success in extreme poverty reduction in the known history of the world [1990-2018]. The chart below shows the changes in millions of extreme poor by region WITH China and India in panel A and WITHOUT China and India in panel B. As shown in panel A, China recorded significant progress in poverty reduction; from a billion people living in extreme poverty in 1990 to almost none by 2015. The progress in India started about a decade later and has been remarkable. What is striking is that, when these two populous countries are excluded in panel B, the progress in reducing extreme poverty in the world becomes much more modest. Extreme poverty reduction did happen in other regions, but the recorded global escape of millions of people from extreme poverty largely happened in India and China, which together account for more than a third of the global population. 4. The historic progress in reducing extreme poverty in the world has stalled in the last decade. In the past decade, progress in reducing extreme poverty has stalled amid a polycrisis, including the COVID-19 pandemic, climate-related shocks, geopolitical tensions, resulting in rising extreme poverty in the Middle East and stagnation in Sub-Saharan Africa. The first Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) to end extreme poverty in the world by 2030 was inspired by a lot of optimism in the development community until 2015 when the SDGs were adopted. Unfortunately, in the decade that followed, progress in reducing extreme poverty stalled. Not only had China eradicated extreme poverty, but the global economy would be hit by several crises, including the COVID-19 pandemic, increasing frequency and severity of climate-related shocks, and geopolitical tensions, such as the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Conflicts in parts of the Middle East contributed to worsening poverty outcomes in affected countries. Sub-Saharan Africa has been vulnerable to these global shocks and recovery has been slow. Consequently, economic growth has been too low in Sub-Saharan Africa to compensate for high population growth. These are the main drivers of the slowdown in extreme poverty reduction in the world in the last decade. Read more details in the World Bank’s Poverty and Shared Prosperity Report 2020, Poverty and Shared Prosperity Report 2022, Poverty, Prosperity, and Planet Report 2024, and its 2026 edition. 5. Going forward to 2050, it is likely that extreme poverty reduction will be sluggish or reverse. If current trajectories persist, little progress in extreme poverty will be observed until 2030 and extreme poverty is likely to increase by 2050. Given the turn of events in the world today, the coming years remain highly uncertain regarding the evolution of extreme poverty. In the recently published Atlas of Global Development, the World Bank projects different scenarios depending on different paths of progress in the past, using a new methodology for measuring progress. If all countries were able to replicate Korea's historical pace of poverty reduction, global extreme poverty would fall to just 1.2 percent by 2050. Yet Korea's experience is exceptional and unlikely to be replicated everywhere. If countries progress at the pace of Brazil or Türkiye, extreme poverty will continue to decline, but only gradually. When using the typical path observed since 1950, global extreme poverty will remain around 9.9 percent in 2030 or 8.5 percent in 2050. More concerning, poverty reduction has slowed sharply in recent years, and if current trends continue, the world could see extreme poverty start to rise again. For an in-depth update on global poverty, see Chapter 1 of the World Bank’s newly published flagship report, Poverty, Prosperity, and Planet Report 2026. The authors gratefully acknowledge financial support from the UK Government through the Data and Evidence for Tackling Extreme Poverty (DEEP) Research Program.