NIGERIA RANKS THIRD AMONG POOR COUNTRIES WITH EXTREMELY POOR PEOPLE

Nigeria ranks third among countries having extremely poor people, World Bank says
Bassey Udo - 37 mins agoBUSINESS

The report said Nigeria and four other countries are home to nearly 760 million of the world’s poor.
Nigeria is third among countries with the highest population of extreme poor or people with abject poverty in the world, the World Bank has said.
In its latest report on the world’s poverty index, titled ‘Prosperity for All – Ending Extreme Poverty’, the World Bank listed the top five countries, in terms of numbers of poor, as India (with 33 percent of the world’s poor), China (13 percent), Nigeria (7 percent), Bangladesh (6 percent) and the Democratic Republic of Congo (5 percent).
The report said the five countries are home to nearly 760 million of the world’s poor.
The National Bureau of Statistics, NBS, puts the population of Nigerians in poverty at about 112 million, representing about 67 per cent of the country’s 167 million population.
Nigeria’s recently released per capita GDP stands at $1,555 per annum. South Africa, which is rated the second largest economy in Africa, behind Nigeria, has a per capita GDP of $7,336 per annum.
Last week, the World Bank President, Jim Kim, said that two-thirds of the world’s extreme poor are concentrated in these five countries.
Mr. Kim said if five other countries, namely Indonesia, Pakistan, Tanzania, Ethiopia and Kenya, are added, the total number of countries with extreme poverty grows to 80 per cent of global population.
He said a sharp emphasis on these countries would be central to ending extreme poverty in the world.
But, in its latest report released during the ongoing Spring Meetings 2014 on Thursday, the World Bank noted that while economic growth remains vital for reducing poverty, growth has its limits.
Governments, the Bank said, need to complement efforts to enhance growth with policies that allocate more resources to the extreme poor by promoting more inclusive growth or conditional and direct cash transfers.
While it was imperative to end extreme poverty, the World Bank said it was even more important to ensure that, in the long run, people do not get stuck just above the extreme poverty line due to lack of opportunities that impede progress toward better livelihoods.
“Economic growth has been vital for reducing extreme poverty and improving the lives of many poor people,” Mr. Kim said at the report presentation.
“Even if all countries grow at the same rates as over the past 20 years, and if the income distribution remains unchanged, world poverty will only fall by 10 per cent by 2030, from 17.7 per cent in 2010,” the report said
This, the bank chief said, underlined the need to focus on making growth more inclusive and targeting more programmes to assist the poor directly if the drive to end extreme poverty was to succeed.
To end extreme poverty, the World Bank President said the vast population of those with abject poverty – those earning less than $1.25 a day – would have to be cut by 50 million people each year until 2030.
The implication, he said, is that about one million people each week would have to be lifted out of poverty for the next 16 years.
“Growth alone is unlikely to end extreme poverty by 2030,” the World Bank President said. “As extreme poverty declines, growth on its own tends to lift fewer people out of poverty.
“This is because, by this stage, many of the people still in extreme poverty live in situations where improving their lives is extremely difficult.”
He noted that increased income inequality was capable of dampening the impact of growth on reducing poverty, pointing out that in countries with rising income inequality, the effect of growth on poverty has been dampened or even reversed.
In contrast, he said, research has also revealed that in countries where inequality was falling, the decline in poverty for a given growth rate was greater.
He said the World Bank Group’s goals of ending extreme poverty and boosting shared prosperity were closely linked, with lasting progress in ending extreme poverty also requiring continued attention to what was happening to the bottom 40 per cent of the population.
The Senior Vice President and Chief Economist at the World Bank, Kaushik Basu, expressed dismay that despite the picture of a prosperous world, over one billion people live in extreme poverty.