The impact of the global shocks on extreme poverty

Abstract

The recent release by the Italian National Statistical Institute (Istat) of the update of the methodology to estimate absolute poverty in Italy (Istat, 2023) represents an important opportunity to get a snapshot of the international context and of the fight against poverty in the world. This paper focusses on the global shocks that have characterized the last four years (2020-2023) and that have brought a worsening of the international scenario which has undermined the progress achieved. In 2020 the nearly constant decline, occurred in the last three decades, in the number of people living in extreme poverty – defined as those living on less than $2.15 per capita per day at purchasing power parity in 2017 – stopped and this number resumed increasing (reaching 757 million from about 683). The paper, after the introduction, sketches an analysis of the evolution of extreme poverty in the last 30 years, in the different geographical areas of the world. Then, in the third paragraph, the situation in the recent years of the 28 poorest countries and specifically of those belonging to Sub-Saharan Africa is discussed highlighting the inhomogeneity of the impact of COVID-19 crisis and the growing difficulties of this area. The moving away of the United Nations objective of eradicating extreme poverty (reducing the poverty rate to 3% in the World Bank formulation) by 2030 is dealt with in the final paragraph.