Dire poverty falls despite global slump, report finds, By Annie Lowrey, March 6, 2012, New York Times: “A World Bank report shows a broad-based reduction in extreme poverty – and indicates that the global recession, contrary to economists’ expectations, did not increase poverty in the developing world. The report shows that for the first time the proportion of people living in extreme poverty – on less than $1.25 a day – fell in every developing region between 2005 and 2008. And the biggest recession since the Great Depression seems not to have thrown that trend off course, preliminary data from 2010 indicate. The progress is so dramatic that the world has met the United Nations’ Millennium Development Goals to cut extreme poverty in half five years before its 2015 deadline…”
Poverty-related issues in the news, from the Institute for Research on Poverty