Homeless people line up to receive free food during a lockdown in Ahmedabad (Reuters | File)
London:
Economic fallout from coronavirus pandemic could plunge an additional 395 million people into extreme poverty and increase the total number of people living on less than $ 1.90 per day worldwide to more than one billion, said researchers in a report released Friday.
The report – published by UNU-WIDER, part of the United Nations University – went through a number of scenarios, taking into account the different World Bank poverty lines – of extreme poverty, defined as living with $ 1.90 a day or less, at higher poverty lifelines with less than $ 5.50 a day.
In the worst case – a 20% contraction in per capita income or consumption – the number of people living in extreme poverty could reach 1.12 billion. The same contraction applied to the $ 5.50 threshold among upper-middle-income countries could see more than 3.7 billion people – just over half the world‘s population – living below this poverty line .
“The prospects for the world‘s poorest appear bleak unless governments do more and do it quickly and make up for the daily income loss of the poor,” said Andy Sumner, one of the report’s authors.
“The result is that progress in reducing poverty could be delayed 20 to 30 years and make the UN goal of ending poverty a pipe dream.”
Researchers at King’s College London and Australian National University have also found that poverty is shifted in its geographic distribution.
The region that should see the greatest number of people threatened with plunging into extreme poverty is South Asia, mainly driven by populated India. It was followed by sub-Saharan Africa, from which about a third of the increase would come.
The World Bank said on Monday that it expects 70 to 100 million people to fall into extreme poverty due to the pandemic.
(Reporting by Karin Strohecker; Editing by Grant McCool)
(This story has not been edited by GalacticGaming staff and is automatically generated from a syndicated feed.)
