Poorest Asian Countries 2024

The majority of the poorest now live in Sub-Saharan Africa, where weaker economic growth and high population growth in many countries has led to a rising number of people living in extreme poverty. This dataset provides poverty estimates for a range of absolute and relative poverty lines. Along with data for individual countries, the World Bank also provides global and regional poverty estimates which aggregate over the available country data. Economic growth over the past two centuries has allowed the majority of the world to leave extreme poverty behind.

Unstacking global poverty: Data for high impact action

North Korea may actually be the poorest country in Asia, but the nation’s notoriously secretive government rarely shares its data, so economists must rely upon expert estimates. Poverty in North Korea is attributed to poor governance by the totalitarian regime. As of 2020, it is estimated that some 60% of North Korea’s population lives below the poverty line. Many Asian nations, such as China, India, Japan, and South Korea, are influential figures on the global stage. China and India have the world’s largest populations, with 1.44 billion and 1.39 billion people, respectively. China’s economy is the largest in Asia and second largest globally, while India’s ranks second largest in Asia and fifth largest globally.

At the $6.85 poverty line, virtually no change is observed in global poverty estimates. The new surveys available for the years of the COVID-19 pandemic have increased survey data coverage to 62% of the world’s population in 2020 and 34% in 2021. With this update, poverty estimates are reported for all regions of the world for 2020, except for Sub-Saharan Africa, as well as the Middle East and North Africa. For 2021, regional estimates are now reported for South Asia, and the previously published estimate for Latin America and the Caribbean have been updated. However, the lack of sufficient data for low- and lower-middle-income countries (especially in Sub-Saharan Africa), that account for the majority of the global poor, still limits the global poverty series to 2019.

Poverty

To help communicate the latter, the World Bank produces a variable that groups surveys within each individual country into more comparable ‘spells’. Our Data Explorer provides the option of viewing the data with these breaks in comparability indicated, and these spells are also indicated in our data download. For those who are not aware of such progress – which is the majority of people – it would be easy to make the mistake of believing that poverty is inevitable and that action to tackle poverty is hence doomed to fail. On this page you can find all our data, visualizations and writing relating to poverty. In order to make progress against such poverty in the future, we need to understand poverty around the world today and how it has changed.

1. This is the goal of the International Poverty Line of $2.15 per day – shown in red in the chart – which is set by the World Bank and used by the UN to monitor extreme poverty around the world.
2. Table 1 summarizes the revisions to the regional and global poverty estimates between the March 2023 data vintage and the September 2023 data vintage for the 2019 reference year at all three poverty lines.
3. Many skilled people go abroad to search for better work opportunities, leaving Tajikistan with one of the world’s largest remittance economies.
4. The largest causes of poverty in Kyrgyzstan are its dependence on agriculture and the gaps in knowledge and resources among its people.

From $1.90 to $2.15 a day: the updated International Poverty Line

In collating this survey data the World Bank takes a range of steps to harmonize it where possible, but comparability issues remain. These affect comparisons both across countries and within individual countries over time. The gap between income and consumption is higher at the top of this distribution too, richer households tend to save more, meaning that the gap between income and consumption is higher at the top of this distribution too. Taken together, one implication is that inequality measured in terms of consumption is generally somewhat lower than the inequality measured in terms of income. Extreme poverty declined during the last generation because the majority of the poorest people on poorest country in asia the planet lived in countries with strong economic growth – primarily in Asia.

How much economic growth is necessary to reduce global poverty substantially?

Kyrgyzstan also has few natural resources that are desirable to the rest of the world, and can only export cotton and tobacco. Additionally, many areas of Kyrgyzstan lack adequate banking and financial services, which prevents people from investing and hinders economic growth. This report presents a compact update on the state of multidimensional poverty (henceforth referred to as “poverty”) in the world. It compiles data from 110 developing countries covering 6.1 billion people, accounting for 92 percent of the population in developing countries. As still only a few countries have data from after the COVID-19 pandemic, the report urgently calls for updated multidimensional poverty data.

There are a number of other ways in which comparability across surveys can be limited. The PIP Methodology Handbook provides a good summary of the comparability and data quality issues affecting this data and how it tries to address them. Poverty is about not having enough money to meet basic needs including food, clothing and shelter.[3] [4] There are many working definitions of “poverty”, with considerable debate on the most accurate definition of the term. It faces similar challenges as its neighbor Tajikistan, further exacerbated by issues of corruption and governance. Leading the unfortunate list is Afghanistan, which has a GNI per capita of only $500. The harsh economic climate in Afghanistan is a testament to the enduring conflicts and political instability that the country has been grappling with for many years.

Poverty estimates remain virtually unchanged, except for South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa where there are upward revisions in poverty estimates. For example, the rate of extreme poverty, as measured by the international poverty line of $2.15, increases by 1.9 percentage points to 10.5% for South Asia and by 0.5 percentage points to 35.4% for Sub-Saharan Africa. Globally, extreme poverty is estimated to increase from 8.5% to 9%, representing 41 million more people living in extreme poverty in 2019. India accounts for almost 70% of this global change in extreme poverty (the revisions to the India series are explained in the What’s New document). At the $3.65 poverty line, India accounts for 40% of the slight upward revision of the global poverty rate from 23.6% to 24.1%.

In recent years, Syria has also experienced very high levels of inflation which reached its highest level of 121.29% in 2014. Despite recent economic achievements, the country continues to struggle with poverty, and the government has done little to build the necessary infrastructure required to lift millions of its people out of impoverishment. Surveys are not conducted annually in every country however – coverage is generally poorer the further back in time you look, and remains particularly patchy within Sub-Saharan Africa. You can see that visualized in our chart of the number of surveys included in the World Bank data by decade. The percentage of the population living below national poverty line (%) – poverty line deemed appropriate for a country by its authorities (however definitions of the poverty line vary considerably among nations). Historically, during the whole of the first millennium CE, the country was one of the wealthiest in the continent.

All the data included in this explorer is available to download in GitHub, alongside a range of other poverty and inequality metrics. The fact that rapid progress against poverty has been achieved in many places is one of the most important lessons we can learn from the available data on extreme poverty. This is the goal of the International Poverty Line of $2.15 per day – shown in red in the chart – which is set by the World Bank and used by the UN to monitor extreme poverty around the world. To measure poverty globally, however, we need to apply a poverty line that is consistent across countries.

No household member aged ‘school entrance age + six years or older has completed at least six years of schooling. All visualizations, data, and code produced by Our World in Data are completely open access under the Creative Commons BY license. You have the permission to use, distribute, and reproduce these in any medium, provided the source and authors are credited.

This update also revises poverty estimates for 2018 for those regions with sufficient population coverage and adds estimates for 2019 wherever possible (see the figure below). In contrast, spurred by the conflicts in Yemen and Syria, the Middle East and North Africa region has seen a sharp reversal, with the poverty rate increasing from around 2.1% in 2013 to 4.3% in 2015 and 7% in 2018. In Latin America, poverty has largely stagnated, remaining at around 3.7% between 2015 and 2019. Estimates for Sub-Saharan Africa show that while the poverty rate continues to decrease, the number of poor increased by 18 million people between 2015 and 2018, continuing a trend documented in recent analysis. Most of the poor in Sub-Saharan Africa live in the East Africa region, which is home to 60% of the Sub-Saharan African population and almost two-thirds of the region’s poor. While the poverty rate is around 7 percentage points higher in East than in West Africa at the US$1.90 poverty line, differences become smaller at the higher lines of US$3.20 and US$5.50.