Global poverty rate drops to record low 10 percent: World Bank

WASHINGTON — Global poverty has fallen to a record low.

The World Bank said Wednesday that 10 percent of the world’s population lived on less than $1.90 a day in 2015 — the last year for which numbers were available — down from 11.2 percent in 2013. That means 735.9 million people lived below the poverty threshold in 2015, down by 68.3 million from 804.2 million two years earlier.

Still, the bank warned that the pace of poverty reduction has slowed, jeopardizing its goal of reducing the poverty rate to 3 percent by 2030.

Poverty dropped everywhere but the Middle East and North Africa, where conflicts in Syria and Yemen ratcheted the poverty rate to 5 percent in 2015 from 2.6 percent in 2013, raising the number of impoverished to 18.6 million from 9.5 million.

The poverty rate fell to 41.1 percent from 42.5 percent in Sub-Saharan Africa, to 12.4 percent from 16.2 percent in South Asia, to 4.1 percent from 4.6 percent in Latin America and the Caribbean, to 2.3 percent from 3.6 percent in East Asia and the Pacific and to 1.5 percent from 1.6 percent in Europe and Central Asia.