No Poverty/Global Extreme Poverty

Half a billion projected to live in extreme poverty in 2030 Research teams from the World Bank, ODI, the IHME, and Brookings jointly with the World Data Lab made independent projections for what we can expect for global poverty during the SDG era. While the projections differ in methodology and underlying assumptions, it’s striking how much they align in their projection for what to expect in the coming decade if the world stays on current trajectories. All expect some positive development – the number of people in extreme poverty is expected to continue to decline – but all also agree on the bad headline: the world is not on track to end extreme poverty by 2030. The chart shows the projection made by the development research team at the World Bank. This projection answers the question of what would happen to extreme poverty trends if the economic growth of the past decade (2005–15) continued until 2030:5 The number of people in extreme poverty will stagnate at almost 500 million. This is not because it is not possible to end extreme poverty. In more than half of the countries of the world the share of the population in extreme poverty is now less than 3 percent.6 In the same countries the huge majority – even in today’s richest countries – lived in extreme poverty just a few generations ago. In fact, the big success over the last generation was that the world made rapid progress against the very worst poverty. The number of people in extreme poverty has fallen from nearly 1.9 billion in 1990 to about 650 million in 2018.7 This was possible as economic growth reached more and more parts of the world.8 In Ethiopia, India, Indonesia, Ghana, and China more than half the population lived in extreme poverty a generation ago. But after two decades of growth the share in extreme poverty more than halved in all these countries. Poverty was not concentrated in Africa until recently. In 1990 more than a billion of the extremely poor lived in China and India alone. Since then those economies have grown faster than many of the richest countries in the world and did much to a reduction of global inequality. The concentration of the world’s poorest shifted from East Asia in the 1990s to South Asia in the following decade. Now it has shifted to Sub-Saharan Africa. The projections suggest the geographic concentration of extreme poverty is likely to continue. According to the World Bank forecasts 87% of the world’s poorest are expected to live in Sub-Saharan Africa in 2030 if economic growth follows the trajectory over the recent past. Poverty declined during the last generation because the majority of the poorest people on the planet lived in countries with strong economic growth. This is now different. Stagnation for the poorest Many of the world’s poorest today live in countries that had very low economic growth in the past.9 Consider the case of Madagascar: In the last 20 years GDP per capita has not grown; and the number in extreme poverty increased almost one-for-one with total population. Development economists have emphasized this for some time: The very poorest people in the world did not see their material living conditions improve.10 This fact is surely one of the biggest development failures of our time. Yet the stagnation of the world’s poorest countries is not as widely known as it should be – one reason is that we are not paying attention to poverty lines low enough to focus on what happens to the very poorest. This is an important reminder that one poverty line is not enough and we need to rely on several poverty lines – higher and lower than the international poverty line – to understand what is happening. A rising global middle class and stagnation of the world’s poorest will also mean that a new divide at the lowest end of the global income distribution is opening up. We miss this if we only follow what is happening to the rapidly emerging global middle class or if we rely on global poverty lines that are not capturing what is happening to the poorest. The projections suggest that over the coming decade the stagnation at the bottom will become very clear. The majority of the world’s poorest today live in economies that are not growing and half a billion face the prospect to remain stuck in extreme poverty.  

Zero Hunger/Hunger and Undernourishment

The chart shows the total number of individuals across the world who are defined as undernourished. Globally we see a falling – although variable – trend over the last few decades. The total number of undernourished has been steadily falling. However, over the last few years, the total number increased to around 663 million in 2017. This increase in hunger levels are largely a result of increases in Sub-Saharan Africa (where rates have risen by several percentage points in recent years) and small increases in the Middle East & North Africa. The UN FAO have linked this increase in undernourishment in particular to the rising extent of conflict-affected countries (which is often a leading cause of famine), and compounded by climate-related factors such as the El Niño phenomenon (which can inflict both drought and flood conditions).

Famines.                                                A famine is an acute episode of extreme hunger that results in excess mortality due to starvation or hunger-induced diseases.1 It is this crisis characteristic that distinguishes it from persistent malnutrition, which we discuss in another entry on this website. As we discuss in the Data Quality and Definition section below, the term ‘famine’ can mean different things to different people and has evolved over time. It is only in recent years that more precise, measurable definitions – in terms of mortality rates, food consumption and physical signs of malnutrition – have been developed. But despite these ambiguities, it is nonetheless very clear that in recent decades the presence of major life-taking famines has diminished significantly and abruptly as compared to earlier eras. This is not in anyway to underplay the very real risk facing the roughly 80 million people currently living in a state of crisis-level2 food insecurity and therefore requiring urgent action. Nevertheless, the parts of the world that continue to be at risk of famine represent a much more limited geographic area than in previous eras, and those famines that have occurred recently have typically been far less deadly – as we will go on to show in this entry. For this entry we have assembled a new global dataset on famines from the 1860s until 2016. We estimate that in total 128 Million people died in famines over this period.3 Famines have always occurred as the result of a complex mix of ‘technical’ and ‘political’ factors,4 but the developments of the modern industrial era have generally reduced the salience of natural constraints in causing famine. This includes many developments discussed in other pages of Our World in Data, such as the increasing availability of food per person, made possible through increasing agricultural yields; improvements in healthcare and sanitation; increased trade; reduced food prices and food price volatility; as well as reductions in the number of people living in extreme poverty. Over time, famines have become increasingly “man-made”-phenomena, becoming more clearly attributable to political causes, including non-democratic government and conflict. Paradoxically, over the course of the 20th century famine was virtually eradicated from most of the world, whilst over the same period there occurred some of the worst famines in recorded history. This is because many of the major famines of the 20th century were the outcome of wars or totalitarian regimes. As such, the waning of the very high levels of warfare over the last decades (as seen in the reduced number of battle deaths in recent times) and the spread of democratic institutions has also played a large part in the substantial reduction in famine mortality witnessed in recent decades. Emergency food aid provided by relief agencies continues to play a crucial role in preventing loss of life, and the international relief community has recently developed much better monitoring systems, such as the Famine Early Warning System, that has allowed for greater preparation and more timely interventions. Where poor harvests are the main cause of famine, as in Niger in 2005, relief provision tends to prevent marked increases in mortality. It is the presence of conflict, or abuses of political power that can block food supplies reaching populations which represents the most pertinent trigger of ‘death-dealing’ famines today.5 Thus, overall, we can see in the rapid decline of famine mortality one of the great accomplishments of our era, representing technological progress, economic development and the spread of stable democracies. Viewed in this light, however, it also serves to highlight the appalling continued presence of famines which are, in the modern world, entirely man-made. The entry is based on a global dataset of famines since the mid-19th century produced by us. This ‘Our World in Data-Dataset of Famines’ can be found at the very end of this document and is preceded by a discussion of how this dataset was constructed and on which sources it is based.            

Global Health by Esteban Ortiz-Ospina and Max Roser

Health is fundamental for a good quality of life. Being free from illness or injury directly affects our capacity to enjoy life. In this entry we provide an overview of the available empirical evidence on aggregate health outcomes, focusing on long-run cross-country data from mortality and morbidity tables; and then provide an analysis of available evidence on health determinants, focusing specifically on the returns to macro healthcare investments. Life expectancy is the most commonly used measure used to describe a population’s health. Historical data shows that global life expectancy has increased drastically over the last couple of centuries, with substantial long-run improvements in all countries around the world. In fact, recent life expectancy gains in developing countries have been particularly important. However, despite recent progress towards long-run cross-country convergence, there are still huge differences that have to be addressed: in several countries in Sub-Saharan Africa the average life expectancy is still less than 60 years, compared to more than 80 years in countries in Europe or in Japan. Historical reductions in child mortality and maternal mortality have been crucial to improving life expectancy around the world. But also for these two measures of health we observe large remaining inequalities: low-income countries still have, on average, child mortality rates that are more than ten times higher than those in high-income countries. We show that similarly large gaps remain for other measures of health, including recent burden-of-disease estimates. A growing body of empirical research suggests that, at a macro level, health outcomes are highly responsive to healthcare investments. Moreover, as one would expect, the evidence suggests large health returns to healthcare expenditure at low levels of baseline expenditure. This implies that international resources channeled through development assistance for health, if suitably targeted and managed, have the potential of drastically reducing global inequalities in living standards. This is a ‘meta-entry’. All visualizations and data discussed here are also discussed in more detail in other, more specific data entries on the topic of health. In what follows we provide links to these other entries, as we cover the corresponding topics. These include Life Expectancy, Child Mortality, Healthcare Provision, Health Inequality, among other.

Quality Education

Gender Equality

Clean Water & Sanitation

Affordable & Clean Energy

Decent Work & Economic Growth

Industry, Innovation & Infrastructure

Reduced Inequities

Sustainable Cities & Communities

Responsible Consumption & Production

Climate Action

Life Below Water

Life on Land

Peace, Justice & Strong Institutions

Partnerships for the Goals