ABSTRACT
When the delegates to the World Economic Forum met in Davos, Switzerland in 2008, they were preoccupied with the global economic upheavals arising from the international credit crisis caused by the sub-prime lending debacle. However, they also set aside time to talk about the problem of global poverty and the extent to which poverty reduction strategies around the world had succeeded in meeting the United Nation’s Millennium Development Goal of halving the incidence of poverty by 2015. The Forum’s Global Governance Initiative, which is responsible for tracking progress in global poverty eradication, reported that the incidence of absolute poverty had indeed fallen since the beginning of the new century, but that overall, progress had been decidedly mixed. At a global level, poverty reduction efforts were rated on a scale of zero to ten as having reached a score of four. In some parts of the Global South, and particularly in sub-Saharan Africa, very little progress had been made. On the other hand, significant declines in poverty had taken place in East Asia and particularly in China. This conclusion confirmed what many social scientists had known already, namely that the incidence of poverty had fallen more rapidly in East Asia in the preceding two decades than in any other part of the world.
