Up to 150 million people could slip into extreme poverty, living on less than the US $ 1.
Up to 150 million people could slip into extreme poverty, living on less than the US $ 1.90 a day, by late next year depending on how badly economies shrink during the Covid-19 pandemic, the World Bank said Wednesday.
The World Bank estimates between 88 million and 115 million people could slip into extreme poverty this year, with another 23 million to 35 million in 2021.
Middle-income countries are expected to have 82 percent of the new extremely poor, including India, Nigeria, and Indonesia.
Most of the new extreme poor, more than 110 million even by the World Bank's baseline estimate, will be in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa.
The pandemic also threatens to worsen global inequality and make it “harder for countries to return to inclusive growth,” World Bank president David Malpass said.
Global economic growth is expected to fall by 5.2 percent this year, more than in the past eight decades.
“Many of the new poor are likely to be engaged in informal services, construction and manufacturing - the sectors in which economic activity is most affected by lockdowns and other mobility restrictions,” the report says.
Recovery, experts say, could take a decade - a shattering blow to people who had pulled themselves from poverty and saw a better life ahead.
"If the global response fails the world’s poor and vulnerable people now, the losses they have experienced to date may be dwarfed by what lies ahead," the report says.
Roughly a third of the newly extreme poor are expected to be in sub-Saharan Africa, between 26 million and 40 million.
South Asia, however, will see the largest share, between 49 million and 57 million.
In Latin America, a region where more than 650 million people live, the extreme poverty rate would go from 3.9% in 2017 to 4.4% at the end of this year and would reach a total of 28.6 million people.
Without the crisis, experts from the Washington-based Bank predicted that the poverty rate in the region would drop to 3.7%, affecting 23.9 million Latin Americans.
This implies, if the forecast is confirmed, that the crisis would have pushed 4.7 million Latin Americans into extreme poverty in 2020.
In the event that the worst forecast for 2021 is confirmed, the level of hardship would rise to 4.5% of Latin Americans, that is, a total of 29.1 million people would be in extreme poverty.
And climate change could drive another 100 million people into poverty by 2030, the report says, with sub-Saharan Africa seeing some of the “most destructive impacts” of global warming.
The report "offers no simple answers to these major challenges currently confronting the world, because there are not any," the World Bank authors write.
"The world can rise to the occasion - or succumb."
Up to 150 million people could slip into extreme poverty, living on less than the US $ 1.
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