Poverty, Growth, and Inequality Over the Next 50 Years

Evan Hillebrand

Poverty, Growth, and Inequality Over the Next 50 Years

Expert Meeting on How to feed the World in 2050

Year of publication 2009

Author Evan Hillebrand

Product type Document

Edition 1

Full item page

Synopsis (short abstract) Global poverty has fallen dramatically over the last two centuries, and the fall has intensified in recent decades, raising hopes that it could be eliminated within the next 50 years. As industrialization, specialization, and trade raised economic growth and living standards in Western Europe and the European offshoots in the 19th century, much of the rest of the world also started growing rapidly after 1950. Poverty reduction, however, has been very uneven across countries. Since 1980, China alone accounted for most of the world’s decline in extreme poverty. Even though there has been a huge rise in income inequality within China, economic growth has been so strong that hundreds of millions of people have risen out of extreme poverty and the poverty ratio has plummeted. Sub-Saharan Africa, at the other extreme, has seen its poverty headcount continue to rise; the negative impact of low economic growth has far outweighed modest improvements in within-country income in equality. Strong economic growth is the key to future poverty reduction. If the lagging non-OECD2 (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) countries are able to transition to a sustainable higher growth path, the global poverty ratio will fall from about 21 percent in 2005 to less than 2.5 percent in 2050 and the number of people living in absolute poverty will decline another billion people. While the historical record is clear that market-friendly policies and compete nt governance are critical to growth, few economists are bold enough to claim they know the precise combination of policies, and how to implement and sustain those policies, to achieve this economic transition. Forecasts of future economic growth rates and poverty rates are necessarily speculative and depend on a large number of assumptions about human behavior and policy decisions that are impossible to know in advance.

Language English

Related items

Showing items related by metadata.

Brochure, flyer, fact-sheet

Ten years of the Ethiopian Agricultural Transformation Agency – An FAO evaluation of the Agency’s impact on agricultural growth and poverty reduction
Brief
2020

Also available in:

No results found.

This brief summarize the findings of the report "Ten years of the Ethiopian Agricultural Transformation Agency – An FAO evaluation of the Agency’s impact on agricultural growth and poverty reduction". This evaluation finds that ATA has achieved many of the outcomes it is being measured against, in terms of input use, extension services, and agricultural technology. The outcomes observed point to the effective removal of bottlenecks in the rural agricultural economy that have improved the linkages between producers, input markets and agricultural services. The improvements in those priority areas are reflected in productivity gains for certain priority crops and in market orientation positions that confirm ATA’s effectiveness in connecting producers to markets. FAO’s evaluation finds positive macroeconomic effects from ATA interventions, helping to ameliorate the reduction in gross domestic product growth, and also supporting the development of agroindustry and transportation services.
Document

Estimating poverty over time and space: Construction of a time-variant poverty index for Costa Rica 2004

Also available in:

No results found.

This paper presents the construction of a spatially explicit, nationally disaggregated measure of poverty over time in Costa Rica. The paper first describes the two possible methods considered for the construction of a poverty map: principal component analysis (PCA) versus small area estimation. Next, reasons for choosing PCA and a description of its application both at one point in time (1973) and over time are presented together with the resulting poverty maps. The methodology applied represen ts a methodological innovation in that the resulting poverty map is time variant rather than concentrated in a single moment in time. A comparison of the results obtainable using various techniques and a discussion on the relative merits of the various options available concludes the paper.
Meeting
WECAFC - Nineteenth Session - Bridgetown, Barbados, 6-8 September 2023 - Report on the implementation of the International Year of Artisanal Fisheries and Aquaculture (2022) in the context of the Commission-recommended Roadmap for the celebratory year in the WECAFC region and next steps
WECAFC/XIX/2023/6
2023

Also available in:

French
Spanish