Poverty, Prosperity and Planet 2024 — SDGCounting Document Briefs

Publisher: The World Bank
Edition: 2024; the successor to the Bank’s biennial Poverty and Shared Prosperity series, and its first post-pandemic assessment of the combined agenda
Focus: Ending extreme poverty and boosting shared prosperity on a livable planet, and the trade-offs across those three goals
Related: Global MPI 2025, the multidimensional companion to these money-metric lines.

This is the World Bank’s flagship poverty report, now reframed around a single mission: ending extreme poverty and boosting shared prosperity on a livable planet. Its central finding is that progress has stalled. On current growth it would take decades to eradicate extreme poverty and more than a century to lift everyone above $6.85 a day, so the world will miss SDG 1 by a wide margin.

The headline

Extreme poverty reduction, one of the development era’s signature achievements, has slowed to a near halt. About 8.5 percent of the world, roughly 692 million people, still lives below $2.15 a day, and on current trends the rate falls only to 7.3 percent by 2030, far above the 3 percent target. Measured at the $6.85 line more relevant to middle-income countries, the number of poor people is essentially unchanged since 1990: around 3.5 billion, or 44 percent of humanity. Poverty is also concentrating in the hardest places to reach, sub-Saharan Africa and fragile, conflict- affected settings.

From the report’s opening summary: “At the current pace, it would take decades to eradicate extreme poverty and more than a century to lift people above $6.85 per day.”

The numbers

Extreme poverty, $2.15/day. The rate fell from 37.9 percent in 1990 to 8.5 percent, but is projected to reach only 7.3 percent by 2030.
The $6.85 line. Some 44 percent of the world, about 3.5 billion people, lives below it; that count is roughly the same as in 1990 (3,665 million then versus 3,534 million now).
Time to zero. Decades to end extreme poverty at $2.15, and more than a century to lift everyone above $6.85, at current growth.
The prosperity gap. The Bank’s new shared-prosperity measure, the average factor by which incomes must be multiplied to reach $25 a day, fell from 10.9 in 1990 to 4.9, then stalled after the pandemic.
Where the poor are. Sub-Saharan Africa and fragile, conflict-affected situations hold a rising share of the extreme poor, while Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia account for most of the global prosperity gap.
The planet risk. Nearly one in five people is at risk of welfare losses from an extreme weather event they will struggle to recover from.
The trade-off, tested. Lifting everyone above $2.15 would add little to global emissions; even reaching $6.85 for all carries a modest cost relative to 2019 emissions.

The counting angle

The report is candid that its own agenda outruns its data. Its closing message is that advancing on poverty, shared prosperity and a livable planet requires a solid foundation of evidence, and that more investment is needed to produce reliable, granular and timely numbers and to strengthen national statistical systems. The new prosperity-gap metric and the climate-risk indicator both push beyond a single poverty line toward a multidimensional view, but each is only as good as the household surveys underneath it, which are thinnest exactly where poverty is now concentrating.

Our read: The stall is the story, and the honest part is that the Bank names the measurement gap as a binding constraint, not a footnote. A poverty line that cannot see the poorest and most fragile places clearly is a line that will keep reporting a floor, not the truth.

Watch & read

Poverty, Prosperity and Planet 2024, the full report (World Bank).
Global MPI 2025, the multidimensional poverty companion to these money-metric lines.

Figures are drawn from the report’s summary as published by the World Bank; poverty counts and rates use the Bank’s $2.15, $6.85 and $25 (2017 PPP) standards, and 2030 figures are the report’s own projections.