However, South Asia experienced a recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic in 2021, with poverty reducing from 13.1% to 10.9%, while Latin America and the Caribbean experienced an uptick in extreme poverty. Table 1 summarizes the revisions to the regional and global poverty estimates between the March 2023 data vintage and the September 2023 data vintage for the 2019 reference year at all three poverty lines. The least poor country on the list is Myanmar, which is also known as Burma or officially as the Republic of the Union of Myanmar. The country is rich in several natural resources such as historical sites, gems, jade, oil, natural gas, and other resources.
Asia contains 49 countries—though that number is open to interpretation—as well as a handful of sovereign territories and special administrative regions. The household does not have access to improved drinking water (according to SDG guidelines) or improved drinking water is at least a 30-minute walk from home, round trip. The data produced by third parties and made available by Our World in Data is subject to the license terms from the original third-party authors. We will always indicate the original source of the data in our documentation, so you should always check the license of any such third-party data before use and redistribution.
Key Findings (2023, across 110 countries):
Having just become independent from Indonesia in 2002, this half-island nation in the South Pacific (which could easily be considered part of Oceania rather than Asia) is still developing. While Timor-Leste (also called East Timor) exports substantial amounts of coffee, as well as marble, sandalwood, and a growing amount of oil and gas, many of its citizens still rely upon subsistence farming. A rudimentary legal system, low-but-improving adult literacy rate, and a particularly poor telecommunications infrastructure are often cited as additional impediments to economic growth. A former member of the Soviet Union, Uzbekistan is an up-and-coming producer of commodities including gold, copper, uranium, petroleum gas, cotton, and grapes. However, due to rampant bureaucratic corruption, the profits from these industries are largely going into the pockets of a small subset of citizens. This corruption, along with the income inequality it engenders, is considered by economists to be a major obstacle in the country’s journey out of poverty.
The Largest Countries In Asia By Area
In our Data Explorer of this data there is the option to view only income survey data or only consumption survey data, or instead to pool the data available from both types of survey – which yields greater coverage. Such surveys are partly designed with cross-country comparability in mind, but because the surveys reflect the circumstances and priorities of individual countries at the time of the survey, there are some important differences. To understand how incomes across the world compare, researchers need to rely on available national surveys. The World Bank’s PIP data is a large collection of household surveys where steps have been taken by the World Bank to harmonize definitions and methods across countries and over time.
Three billion people cannot afford a healthy diet
Lastly, Syria makes it on the list with a GNI per capita of $1,820, principally due to the catastrophic impacts of the ongoing civil war. Uzbekistan claims the ninth spot with a GNI per capita of $1,670, reflecting its struggles with corruption, labor rights, and economic reforms. War, famine, and a severe economic blockade poorest country in asia have decimated the economic fabric of Yemen, leaving it in a deplorable state. Spanning over 17.2 million square miles (44.58 square kilometers), Asia comprises about 30% of Earth’s total land area and 8.7% of Earth’s total surface area.
For this data release, we also conducted an extensive revision of historical datapoints (largely in the 1990s and early 2000s). Other changes reflect improvements in the welfare aggregate based on new harmonization efforts and more available information. This document outlines the changes made to the underlying data by country and explains why the changes have been made. Ranked by GDP per capita (current US$), Kyrgyzstan is the fifth-poorest country in Asia. The largest causes of poverty in Kyrgyzstan are its dependence on agriculture and the gaps in knowledge and resources among its people.
If this should change, the world needs to achieve very substantial economic growth further still. In that year the World Bank estimates that around 650 million people – roughly one in twelve – were living on less than $2.15 a day. We see that, in global terms, this is an extremely low threshold indeed – set to reflect the poverty lines adopted nationally in the world’s poorest countries. It marks an incredibly low standard of living – a level of income much lower than just the cost of a healthy diet. Generally, poverty has been falling historically, except during periods of large crises. The 1998 Asian Financial Crisis put a brake on global poverty reduction, conflict increased poverty in the Middle East and North Africa prior to the pandemic, and poverty reduction reversed in South Asia when COVID-19 hit in 2020.
This is a list of Asian countries by GDP per capita based on purchasing power parity. Dependent territories (not sovereign states) are not ranked, and are also shown in italics. Afghanistan is a country that has had a turbulent political period in the past, especially while it was under the Taliban regime between September 1996 and December 2001. The Taliban period was extremely detrimental to the economy to the extent where the per capita income in 2001 was only $200. However, following the end of the detrimental regime, the economy has been improving to what it is now.
- It compiles data from 110 developing countries covering 6.1 billion people, accounting for 92 percent of the population in developing countries.
- With this update, poverty estimates are reported for all regions of the world for 2020, except for Sub-Saharan Africa, as well as the Middle East and North Africa.
- To measure poverty globally, however, we need to apply a poverty line that is consistent across countries.
- In Latin America, poverty has largely stagnated, remaining at around 3.7% between 2015 and 2019.
We also include a split of Sub-Saharan Africa into East and West Africa, following the new regional classifications adopted by the World Bank. The estimates for 2017 were first published in September 2020, and this is the first revision. With the new data, the estimate of the global $1.90 headcount ratio increases very slightly, from 9.2% to 9.3%, and the number of poor increases from 689 million to 696 million people. For the regions with sufficient population coverage, the 2018 estimates are updated and new poverty estimates for 2019 are added. The update includes new surveys that have been received and processed, as well as several changes to the existing data. This type of data is important to broaden the coverage of countries where full household surveys are less frequent, such as in fragile and conflict-affected countries.
In collating this survey data the World Bank takes a range of steps to harmonize it where possible, but comparability issues remain. These affect comparisons both across countries and within individual countries over time. The gap between income and consumption is higher at the top of this distribution too, richer households tend to save more, meaning that the gap between income and consumption is higher at the top of this distribution too. Taken together, one implication is that inequality measured in terms of consumption is generally somewhat lower than the inequality measured in terms of income. Extreme poverty declined during the last generation because the majority of the poorest people on the planet lived in countries with strong economic growth – primarily in Asia.
Global poverty estimates were updated today on the Poverty and Inequality Platform (PIP) . As explained in more detail in the What’s New document, a total of 63 new surveys were added to the PIP database, bringing the total number of surveys to more than 2,200. In addition, two surveys were added for 2019 and 13 more surveys were added for more recent years.
Countries
Such regional disparities underscore the need for targeted policy measures and international support to uplift those facing the harshest economic conditions and to facilitate sustainable development in these nations. This mountainous nation is burdened by ongoing armed conflict, government corruption, and prolific income inequality. After the United States and United Nations withdrew their troops in mid-2021, the Taliban retook control of Afghanistan’s government. The long-term impact of this change on Afghanistan’s economic situation has yet to be seen.
In recent years, Syria has also experienced very high levels of inflation which reached its highest level of 121.29% in 2014. Despite recent economic achievements, the country continues to struggle with poverty, and the government has done little to build the necessary infrastructure required to lift millions of its people out of impoverishment. Surveys are not conducted annually in every country however – coverage is generally poorer the further back in time you look, and remains particularly patchy within Sub-Saharan Africa. You can see that visualized in our chart of the number of surveys included in the World Bank data by decade. The percentage of the population living below national poverty line (%) – poverty line deemed appropriate for a country by its authorities (however definitions of the poverty line vary considerably among nations). Historically, during the whole of the first millennium CE, the country was one of the wealthiest in the continent.
Reasons for this dysfunction include governmental corruption and elitism, religious and secular conflict, and a lack of democratic ideals. The country also spends the largest part of its national budget on defense, allocating only 2.6% of its total GDP to education. An absolute poverty line represents a fixed standard of living; a threshold that is held constant across time. Within the World Bank’s poverty data, absolute poverty lines also aim to represent a standard of living that is fixed across countries (by converting local currencies to international-$). The International Poverty Line of $2.15 per day (in 2017 international-$) is the best known absolute poverty line and is used by the World Bank and the UN to measure extreme poverty around the world. About 26% of Myanmar’s population lives in poverty, particularly in rural areas, where about 70% of the population lives.