Extreme poverty has gone down by 12.3 percentage points between 2011-2019, a rate significantly lower than that of the 2004-2011 period. Poverty headcount rate dropped from 22.5 per cent in 2011 to 10.2 per cent in 2019 with more pronounced deductions in rural areas compared to urban areas, according to a recent World Bank working paper.
The decline in rural areas was much higher than in urban areas. While the reduction in rural poverty dropped by 14.7 percentage points, the poverty in urban areas dropped by 7.9 percentage points.
The paper titled ‘Poverty has Declined over the last decade But Not As Much As Previously Thought’ was jointly authored by economists Sutirtha Sinha Roy and Roy van der Weide.