The state of the poor : where are the poor, where is extreme poverty harder to end, and what is the current profile of the world's poor?

Although the world witnessed an unprecedented pace of poverty reduction over the last decades, reducing the number of people living in extreme poverty by more than 700 million, approximately 1.2 billion people remained entrenched in destitution in 2010.1 In order to leverage developing country efforts and galvanize the international development community to exert concerted effort to end extreme poverty, the World Bank has established the twin goals of ending extreme poverty by 2030 and promoting shared prosperity by fostering income growth of the bottom 40 percent of the population in every country. Ending extreme poverty in just one generation is a formidable challenge by all accounts that requires a thorough understanding of the state of the poor. The objective of this note is to analyze some of the diverse characteristics of 1.2 billion poor people who are the focus of the poverty reduction efforts of governments and the international development community. Despite the impressive progress in the fight against poverty in the developing world as a whole, the progress has been much slower in Low Income Countries (LICs). Poverty for middle and high income countries fell by more than a half since 1981. For LICs, however, extreme poverty fell by less than a third.