World Bank calls for focus on India for poverty eradication
With close to one-third of the world's extreme poor concentrated in India, authorities would need to focus on India for executing measures aimed at poverty alleviation, says a new World Bank paper.
The top five poorest countries - India (with 33 percent of the world's poor), China (13 percent), Nigeria (7 percent), Bangladesh (6 percent) and the Democratic Republic of Congo (5 percent) - together are home to nearly 760 million of the world's poor.
Adding another five countries -- Indonesia, Pakistan, Tanzania, Ethiopia, and Kenya -- would encompass almost 80 percent of the extreme poor.
Tackling poverty requires understanding where the greatest number of poor live, while at the same time also concentrating on where hardship is most pervasive, according to the World Bank paper "Prosperity for All", released here Thursday.
This entails concerted efforts in countries where large numbers of the world's 1.2 billion poor live, it says.
While economic growth remains vital for reducing poverty, growth has its limits, the paper said suggesting that countries need to complement efforts to enhance growth with policies that allocate more resources to the extreme poor.
"These resources can be distributed through the growth process itself, by promoting more inclusive growth, or through government programmes, such as conditional and direct cash transfers," it said.
Citing the example of India, the report notes that in recent years, new Information Communications Technologies (ICT) applications have created opportunities to re-engineer and upgrade traditional systems and to empower beneficiaries.
"However, the benefits are not automatic and our understanding of its impact is yet incomplete," the paper conceded.
"It is a sad commentary on our prosperous world that over one billion people live in extreme poverty," said Kaushik Basu, senior vice president and chief economist at the World Bank.
"It is a welcome call from the World Bank Group to not just mitigate poverty but bring it to closure and also to strive for a more equitable world," he said.
"To achieve these ends we will need determination, but also ideas and innovation, for the ways of the economy can be strange."
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