WASHINGTON – The World Bank, through its Poverty and Inequality Platform (PIP), has released an updated global poverty estimate in March 2024. This update is the first to report global poverty figures for the 2020-2022 period, covering the COVID-19 pandemic era, by integrating over 100 new surveys into a database that now comprises more than 2,300 surveys.

The estimates indicate that the COVID-19 pandemic contributed to a rise in extreme poverty worldwide. Measured by the international poverty line of $2.15 per day, the global extreme poverty rate increased from 8.9 percent in 2019 to 9.7 percent in 2020, marking the first such increase in decades.

  • This surge was notably driven by South Asia, where extreme poverty rose by 2.4 percentage points to 13 percent between 2019 and 2020.
  • Conversely, in Latin America and the Caribbean, extreme poverty showed a decline in 2020, partly due to the role of fiscal policies in Brazil in mitigating economic impacts.
  • At higher poverty lines ($3.65 and $6.85), poverty also decreased in several regions such as Latin America and the Caribbean, East Asia and the Pacific, Europe and Central Asia, and other high-income countries, even during 2020.

Although global economies began to recover in 2021, and by 2022 extreme poverty levels in some more prosperous regions were lower than pre-pandemic, global poverty overall remained marginally above pre-pandemic levels. An estimated 23 million more people were living in extreme poverty in 2022 compared to 2019.

The post-pandemic economic recovery has been uneven, progressing slower in Sub-Saharan Africa, a region home to more than half of the world's extreme poor. Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2022 also contributed to rising global inflation. Nevertheless, at the $3.65 and $6.85 poverty lines, the global poverty rate in 2022 was lower than in 2019, consistent with a faster recovery in more prosperous regions.

This March 2024 update also revises previously published global and regional estimates from 1981 to 2022, incorporating the latest CPI, national accounts, and population data. The methodology for aligning regional and global poverty has also been adjusted. These revisions led to minor changes, such as a slight downward adjustment of global extreme poverty in 2019 by 0.1 percentage points to 8.9 percent, reducing the number of poor from 701 million to 689 million, primarily driven by new survey data in Europe and Central Asia and the Middle East and North Africa.