Global Poverty is Decreasing at a Dramatic Rate

The Brookings Institute has just published a report called The Changing State of Global Poverty.

Socialists have to be pretty unhappy about the results, as the shift to market economies in many places throughout the world continues to improve the lives of the people and clearly show that when markets are allowed to work, nearly everyone benefits.

Comments from Next Big Future below:

"Our results indicate that the world has seen a dramatic decrease in global poverty over the past six years, and that this trend is set to continue in the four years ahead. We estimate that between 2005 and 2010, the total number of poor people around the world fell by nearly half a billion people, from over 1.3 billion in 2005 to under 900 million in 2010. Looking ahead to 2015, extreme poverty could fall to under 600 million people—less than half the number regularly cited in describing the number of poor people in the world today. Poverty reduction of this magnitude is unparalleled in history: never before have so many people been lifted out of poverty over such a brief period of time.

Over the past half century, the developing world, including many of the world’s poorest countries, have seen dramatic improvements in virtually all non-income measures of well-being: since 1960, global infant mortality has dropped by more than 50 percent, for example, and the share of the world’s children enrolled in primary school increased from less than half to nearly 90 percent between 1950 and today.5 Likewise there have been impressive gains in gender equality, access to justice and civil and political rights. Yet, through most of this period, the incomes of rich and poor countries diverged, and income poverty has proven a more persistent challenge than other measures of wellbeing. The rapid decline in global poverty now underway—and the early achievement of the MDG1a target—marks a break from these trends, and could come to be seen as a turning point in the history of global development."