Extreme poverty worldwide could be eradicated by 2050, says report – National

A new paper predicts that extreme poverty worldwide may end by 2050.

The paper, with the title Scenarios for future global growth to 2050, is from the Center for Global Development. It projects that there could be fewer people living in poverty by 2050 than at any time in history.

“Continued economic growth should leave almost no one in the most desperate poverty that was the lot of the vast majority of humanity for most of history, albeit decades after it could have been eradicated,” said one author of the paperCharles Kenny, in a statement.

According to the paper, low-income countries could disappear as a group by then, and it is likely that two-thirds of the world will live on more than $10 a day, up from 42 percent currently, and the extreme poverty line – living on $2.15 per day — may be gone by 2050.

The institute notes that eradicating extreme poverty by 2050 would be two decades after the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals hoped it would happen.

According to the models used by the authors, the proportion of the population living in extreme poverty will drop to below two percent by 2050, and from 29 percent to seven percent in Africa.

The paper notes that it is still possible that there are global events that cannot be predicted that could change its projections, but suggests that education is likely to be a factor favoring convergence globally as average years of schooling will grow in poorer countries. Climate change is also unlikely to be a major driver of global economic trends until 2050, according to the paper.

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“For all the challenges this likely future may present, it is one of a richer planet with more resources to respond to pandemic threats through climate shocks that contains far fewer people living in the kind of absolute poverty that was the party of ninety percent of humanity for almost all of our history,” Kenny said in a blog post.

China has invested heavily in Africa as part of its Belt and Road initiative, pumping nearly US$3 billion into the continent in 2020, according to the International Institute of Sustainable Development.

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