The proportion of people in developing countries living in extreme economic poverty - defined by the World Bank as living on less than $1 per day - has fallen from 28 percent in 1990 to 21 percent in 2001. Although there has been a substantial reduction in global poverty, it is marked with great regional differences. Poverty declined substantially in China and Southeast Asian countries as a result of rapid economic growth and massive investments in human resource development. The number of poor people in China has come down from 606 million in 1981 to 212 million in 2001.

In the countries of South Asia (India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bangladesh, Bhutan) the decline has not been as rapid. Despite the decline in the percentage of the poor, the number of poor has declined marginally from 475 million in 1981 to 428 million in 2001. Because of different poverty line definition, poverty in India is also shown higher than the national estimates. In Sub-Saharan Africa, poverty in fact rose from 41 percent in 1981 to 46 percent in 2001 (see graph 3.3). In Latin America, the ratio of poverty remained the same.

Poverty has also resurfaced in some of the former socialist countries like Russia, where officially it was nonexistent earlier. The proportion of people living under poverty in different countries is defined by the international poverty line (means population below $1 a day).