Ending poverty requires more than growth: WB

To reduce poverty, countries need to enhance growth with policies that allocate more resources to the extreme poor, according to a new World Bank paper released on Thursday.

"Economic growth has been vital for reducing extreme poverty and improving the lives of many poor people," said World Bank President Jim Yong Kim at a briefing for releasing the report.

"But if this mass migration of people moving from poverty to prosperity is really to gather strength, we need growth that is inclusive, creates jobs, and assists the poor directly," Kim said.

The paper said, growth alone is unlikely to end extreme poverty by 2030, a goal set by the World Bank at the spring meeting last year, because as extreme poverty declines, growth on its own tends to lift fewer people out of poverty.

The paper noted that in countries with rising income inequality, the effect of growth on poverty has been dampened or even reversed. In contrast, research indicates that in countries where inequality was falling, the decline in poverty for a given growth rate was greater.

Based on the World Bank's goal to end extreme poverty, those earning less than 1.25 U.S. dollars a day, by 2030, the number of the poorest people will have to decrease by 50 million people each year or 1 million people each week.