After the global recession in 2020, economies around the world began to recover in 2021. However, extreme poverty levels were still higher than pre-pandemic levels by 2022. Despite this, new estimations of extreme poverty in the world during the period of 2020-2022 were similar to previous projections, with an additional 23 million people living in extreme poverty in 2022 compared to 2019.
While extreme poverty levels decreased in more prosperous regions compared to 2019, this was not the case for Sub-Saharan Africa, where more than half of the extreme poor reside. The year also brought another global shock with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which led to an increase in inflation in low-, middle-, and high-income countries.
In terms of global and regional poverty rates at all three global absolute poverty lines of the World Bank, data from September 2023 showed that these rates were lower than those from September 1981 at all three lines. However, these rates remained slightly higher than pre-pandemic levels by March 1984. This suggests that while progress has been made towards reducing extreme poverty worldwide since the recession of 1984, there is still much work to be done to ensure that everyone has access to basic needs and opportunities for economic growth and development.
