Martin Ravallion is an Australian economist. As of 2013 he was the inaugural Edmond D. Villani Professor of Economics at University, and previously had been director of the research department at the World Bank He holds a PhD in economics from the London School of Economics.
Ravallion has researched extensively on poverty in developing countries and on policies for fighting poverty. In 1990 he proposed what has come to be known as the "$1 a day" poverty line, and since then he and his colleagues at the bank monitored progress against global poverty by this and other measures. A paper he wrote in 2012 became the basis of the World Bank, and subsequently United Nations, development goal of eliminating extreme poverty in the world by 2030. He has advised numerous governments and international agencies and written five books and 250 papers in scholarly journals and edited volumes.
There is a little-noticed but important difference between the World Bank’s original goal for poverty reduction and the subsequent UN Sustainable Development Goal (SDG). While both target the “$1.90 a day” poverty rate, the Bank’s goal was a 3% rate by 2030, while the SDG is to “eradicate” poverty by 2030. Simple linear projections of recorded progress against $1.90 poverty in the world does suggest that we are on track to attaining the UN’s goal. If we can return to the pre-COVID pace of poverty reduction after two or three years, then we should still be roughly on track. However, a closer scrutiny of the pre-COVID data leaves one less optimistic.
There are a priori reasons why the last few percent could be harder to reach with current development policies. Consistently with that hypothesis, the paper documents recent (pre-COVID-19) signs of a levelling off in progress for the poorest in East Asia—the star performer regionally over the longer term. This is evident in the region’s slower progress recently in both lifting the floor—thus reaching the poorest—and in reducing the poverty rate. This levelling off is also found on average for the 18 developing countries that have reduced their poverty rate from over 10% (around the current global rate) to under 3% during 1981-2017. Similarly to East Asia, progress in reaching the poorest declined once the last 3% had been reached, though some countries did better than others. Overall, the results suggest that re-turning to “business as usual” post-COVID will not suffice to eradicate extreme poverty.
