Poverty a pandemic.

Byline: Syed Tahir Rashdi - Shahdadpur, Sindh

BETWEEN 1980 and 2016, the average income of the bottom 50 per cent of earners nearly doubled, as this group posted 12 per cent of the growth in global GDP. The number of those living on less than $1.90 a day, the World Bank's threshold for extreme poverty, dropped by more than half since 1990, from nearly two billion people to around 700 million. Never before in human history have so many people been lifted out of poverty so quickly. However, the coronavirus pandemic has changed everything for the worse.

Up to 250 million jobs are likely to be lost globally besides pushing between 40 million to 60 million people into extreme poverty. The charity group Oxfam has warned that a recession caused by Covid-19 could push half a billion people into poverty unless urgent action is taken.

Conducted by King's College London and Australian National University, the research gauged the short-term impacts of containing the coronavirus on global monetary poverty based on World Bank poverty lines of $1.90, $3.20 and $5.50 a day.

Now casting global poverty is not an easy task. It requires assumptions about how to forecast growth and how such growth will impact the poor, along with other complications such as how to calculate poverty for countries with outdated data or without data altogether. All of this goes to show...