Over the past two decades, the world has been living through the most dramatic decline in global poverty ever. Since 2000, while global population has increased by 1.4 billion people, the number of people living in extreme poverty dropped by about 1 billion. This remarkable success has brought a goal long considered a pipedream into view: the end of extreme poverty. Three years ago, governments from around the world committed to eliminate extreme poverty by 2030, as the first of the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDG).

Based on a simple extrapolation of past progress, this goal seems easily attainable: Currently about 8 percent of the world’s population lives in extreme poverty, and over the last 20 years that figure has been dropping by roughly one percentage point a year. Yet such back-of-the-envelope calculations obscure the fact that the nature of the fight against poverty is quickly changing. Back in 2000, the top 10 countries ranked by the largest populations in extreme poverty—collectively accounting for over three-quarters of global poverty—were China, India, Nigeria, Indonesia, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Bangladesh, Myanmar, Pakistan, Tanzania, and Ethiopia. Between 2000 and 2015, 7 of these 10 countries cut their poverty headcount ratios by at least 70 percent (all but the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Nigeria, and Tanzania). This is what drove the global poverty rate down by a percentage point a year.

But as of 2018, many of these countries have already nearly eliminated extreme poverty, and thus have little impact on global aggregate figures. Today, extreme poverty is increasingly concentrated in a set of countries that have achieved only limited development success in recent decades, and whose prospects for rapid growth appear slim.

Read the full article about ending extreme poverty in 31 off-track countries by Geoffrey Gertz and Homi Kharas at Brookings.