Nations must allocate more resources to end poverty: WB

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Countries such as India, which accounted for nearly a third of the people living in poverty globally, needed to complement efforts to enhance growth with policies that allocated more resources to the extreme poor, the World Bank said on Thursday.

In a report, the global lender said resources could be distributed through the growth process itself by promoting more inclusive growth or through government programmes such as conditional and direct cash transfers.

Countries such as India needed to complement efforts to enhance growth with policies that allocated more resources to the extreme poor, the report said.

The top five countries in terms of numbers of poor are India (with 33 per cent of the world's poor), China (13 per cent), Nigeria (seven per cent), Bangladesh (six per cent) and the Democratic Republic of Congo (five per cent) which together are home to nearly 760 million of the world's poor. Adding another five countries - Indonesia, Pakistan, Tanzania, Ethiopia, and Kenya - would encompass almost 80 per cent of the extreme poor. Hence, a sharp emphasis on these countries would be central to ending extreme poverty, the report said.

 

"Economic growth has been vital for reducing extreme poverty and improving the lives of many poor people," World Bank Group President Jim Yong Kim said. "Yet, even if all countries grow at the same rates as over the past 20 years and if the income distribution remains unchanged, world poverty will only fall by 10 per cent by 2030, from 17.7 per cent in 2010," Kim said.