Data Insights
Bite-sized insights on how the world is changing, published every few days.
PovertySeptember 12, 2025
The latest World Bank data counts 125 million more people as living in extreme poverty — but the world has not gotten poorer
To track progress towards ending extreme poverty, the United Nations relies on World Bank estimates of the number of people living below a poverty threshold called the “International Poverty Line” (IPL).
In June 2025, the World Bank announced a major change to this line, raising it significantly, from $2.15 to $3 per day. As a result, 125 million people who would not have been counted as extremely poor before June are now included.
The increased IPL and the higher poverty estimates are due to a mix of overlapping changes, which we explained in a recent article.
Two things are particularly important to know.
First, the higher estimates of extreme poverty reflect a higher poverty threshold, not that the world is poorer. In fact, the latest data shows that incomes among the world’s poorest are actually higher than previously estimated.
Second, the overall message is the same whether we look at the new or previous estimates. Progress in recent decades has been enormous: well over a billion people have escaped extreme poverty since 1990. But this progress has now stalled. Incomes are stagnant in the places where most of the world’s poorest live. Unless this changes, hundreds of millions of people will be stuck in extreme poverty for years to come.
Read our complete explainer on the new International Poverty Line and World Bank poverty data →
July 09, 2025
Extreme poverty has not declined in these four Southern African countries
Globally, the share of the population living in extreme poverty has declined fast, from 38% in 1990 to 9% in 2024.
Some countries, however, have not made any progress against poverty. Four of them are in Southeast Africa, as shown in the chart. In Zambia, Malawi, Mozambique, and Madagascar, most people still live in extreme poverty, and this hasn’t changed in decades.
Poverty has remained high because these economies have not achieved economic growth in recent decades.
In the 1990s, most extremely poor people lived in countries that went on to have strong economic growth. Today, however, a substantial share of the poorest people live in economies that have not grown in decades. Based on current trends, this means that the world cannot expect an end to extreme poverty.
Whether or not the economies that are home to the poorest people in the world start to grow will determine whether the world ends extreme poverty.
I’ve written more about this in “The history of the end of poverty has just begun”, where I explain why economic growth is key to ending poverty →
April 30, 2025
One in six people live in Sub-Saharan Africa, but it accounts for two-thirds of global extreme poverty
Every twelfth person in the world still lives in extreme poverty. That means surviving on less than $2.15 per day (adjusted for differences in living costs between countries).
For many, that means struggling to afford nutritious food, not being able to afford basic healthcare, safe sanitation, or electricity.
So, where do most people in extreme poverty live? The chart shows that Sub-Saharan Africa, which is home to just 16% of the global population, now accounts for 67% of people living in extreme poverty.
This distribution is very different from 25 years ago. In 2000, Asia was home to most of the world’s population living in extreme poverty. However, strong economic growth in recent decades has led to steep reductions in poverty. Progress in Sub-Saharan Africa has been much slower.
If we're serious about ending extreme poverty worldwide, supporting economic development in Sub-Saharan Africa has to be a top priority. The recent progress achieved by some African countries reminds us that meaningful change is within reach.
April 18, 2025
Brazil, Venezuela, and Mexico account for 59% of people living in poverty in Latin America
A recent report by the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) highlights the high concentration of poverty in Latin America. Across the region, around 89 million people — more than one in seven — live on less than $3.65 a day.
Poverty can be measured using various poverty lines; here, we’re looking at the $3.65 line, which the World Bank uses to define poverty in lower-middle-income countries.
The chart shows that 52.2 million people living under this line are in just three countries — Brazil, Venezuela, and Mexico — representing 59% of the region’s total.
As the report explains, while Brazil and Mexico don’t have the highest poverty rates, their large populations mean they have the largest number of people living below this line. Venezuela, in contrast, has a smaller population but one of the region’s highest poverty rates.
Identifying where poverty is most concentrated can help target efforts to reduce and eliminate it.
April 02, 2025
China reduced extreme poverty rapidly, but Indonesia hasn't been far behind
China is often the poster child for rapid reductions in poverty, and for good reason: in the early 1980s, over 90% of its population lived in extreme poverty, but by the early 2020s, that number had dropped to nearly zero.
Some people assume that China is the only reason global extreme poverty has declined. But that’s wrong: many other countries have seen dramatic reductions in poverty. Indonesia is one clear example; it’s shown alongside China on the chart.
In 1984, three-quarters of Indonesians lived on less than $2.15 per day. By 2023, this had fallen to less than 2%. While it didn’t quite match China’s decline, it has still been impressive. The number of people living in extreme poverty has fallen from 120 million to 5 million.
Note that the international poverty line is extremely low, defined as people living on less than $2.15 per day. But Indonesia has also made progress measured by higher poverty lines.
Explore progress against poverty across the world in our data explorer →
January 14, 2025
In many countries, more than half of the population faces poverty in multiple dimensions
The experience of poverty goes far beyond having no or low income. Unfortunately, still in many countries today, a large share of people experience severe poverty in many areas of life, such as health, education, and living standards.
To capture this broader reality, researchers from the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative and the UN Development Programme developed the global Multidimensional Poverty Index. This group of indicators measures poverty across essential areas of well-being, capturing whether people are undernourished, whether they lost a child, and lack access to education or basic facilities like clean water or electricity.
The map shows the share of the population in each country living in multidimensional poverty, highlighting where households face overlapping deprivations.
In countries across South America and some in East Asia, this share is less than 10%. But in many countries in Sub-Saharan Africa, more than half of the people experience these extreme conditions. The share even exceeds 4 in 5 people in Niger (91%), Chad (84%), and the Central African Republic (80%).
These figures are based on data from over 100 countries drawn from household surveys conducted between 2011 and 2023.
Read more on our article: Beyond income: understanding poverty through the Multidimensional Poverty Index →
June 17, 2024
Extreme poverty, though lower than in the past, is still very high in Sub-Saharan Africa
The United Nations’ first Sustainable Development Goal is to “end poverty in all its forms everywhere” by 2030. The world is still very far away from this goal.
The data from the World Bank shows that in 1990, 55% of the population in Sub-Saharan Africa and 65% in East Asia and the Pacific lived in these conditions — broadly similar figures. But the most recent figures were 37% in Sub-Saharan Africa and 1% in East Asia and the Pacific.
The United Nations focuses on “extreme poverty” in its Sustainable Development Goals agenda. They define this as living with less than $2.15 per day. This figure represents what $2.15 could buy you in the United States in 2017 prices; it is adjusted for inflation and cost of living differences between countries.
May 03, 2024
Was the global decline of extreme poverty only due to China?
The share of the world population living in extreme poverty has never declined as rapidly as in the past three decades.
The decline in China was particularly fast, and given that one in six people in the world live there, we’re often asked whether the decline in global poverty was only due to the decline in China.
The chart shows the data that answers this question. In red, we see the global decline. In green, we see the decline if we exclude China from the data. In the world outside of China, 29% lived in extreme poverty in 1990 — by 2022, this share was down to 11%.
The large economic growth that lifted 800 million Chinese people out of extreme poverty since 1990 was a major contributor to the global decline in poverty. But the non-Chinese world also achieved a very large reduction.
It is not true that the global decline in poverty was only due to China. Extreme poverty has declined in China and the rest of the world.
April 17, 2024
National poverty lines differ widely between countries
Global economic inequality is very large. We see this in the differences between average incomes across countries. In this chart, average income is plotted along the horizontal axis and measured by GDP per capita. While the average income is $1,750 in Ethiopia, in Switzerland it’s around $69,000 — this is after adjusting for differences in cost of living.
Because standards of living are so different, richer countries set their own national poverty lines much higher, to measure poverty in a way that is informative and relevant to their citizens' incomes.
The scatter plot captures this insight. As we can see, richer countries (higher GDP per capita along the horizontal axis) tend to set much higher national poverty lines (higher position along the vertical axis).
In Switzerland, a person is considered in poverty if they live on less than the equivalent of roughly $36 per day; in Ethiopia, the national poverty line is around $2 per day.
→ Read more in our page on global poverty. If you are looking for more details on this Data Insight specifically, you can find it in the study on which it is based: Joliffe et al. (2022).
March 06, 2024
Extreme poverty in China has been almost eliminated — first in urban, then in rural regions
In 1981, 97% of people in the Chinese countryside lived in extreme poverty. Even in cities, it was more than 70%.
Since then, large economic growth has made it possible for hundreds of millions of people in China to leave extreme poverty behind, first in cities and then in the countryside.
By 2020, the share of people living in extreme poverty in both urban and rural areas was below 1%.