Global poverty and inequality from 1980 to the COVID-19 pandemic

The world made remarkable progress in reducing extreme poverty over the last twenty years. Recent progress has slowed, however, and the economic damage wrought by the COVID-19 pandemic imperils progress towards achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of eradicating extreme poverty and alleviating inequality by the year 2030. To track progress towards the SDGs, we collated—to the best of our knowledge—the largest collection of poverty and inequality related data and developed novel methods to construct comprehensive and comparable estimates of poverty and inequality from 1980 to 2019 in 204 countries and territories, across urban and rural settings, and by age; further, we forecast the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on poverty out to 2021. We find that over the past four decades, the number of individuals living in extreme poverty declined dramatically, however, extreme poverty counts were rising in Sub-Saharan Africa. The Millennium Development Goal (MDG) era corresponded to the fastest observed reduction in extreme poverty and a period of more equitable growth. Progress made is jeopardized by the economic shock resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic. Estimates of poverty through 2021 highlight the effect of the global economic shock, the effect of governments’ economic responses to the pandemic, and the need to build economies resilient to the next global threat.