Extreme poor left behind: their consumption rose just 10 percent while the world average rose 70 percent since 1990

Progress against extreme poverty, defined as living on less than three dollars per person per day, has practically come to a standstill and is likely to reverse in the coming decade under business-as-usual assumptions, according to the World Bank Group's flagship Poverty, Prosperity and Planet Report 2026. Between 1990 and 2026, average consumption worldwide increased by approximately 70 percent and hundreds of millions escaped extreme poverty - yet average consumption among those remaining in extreme poverty increased by only 10 percent over the same period, and has actually declined over the past decade, a period marked by major global shocks. This is at odds with the 2015 Sustainable Development Goals pledge to leave no one behind by 2030.

The absolute gap has widened even more dramatically: in 1990 the average person worldwide consumed about 11 dollars more per day than someone in extreme poverty; by 2026 that difference had nearly doubled, to 20 dollars a day. Until around 2005, the two groups' consumption grew at similar rates, when a significant share of Asia's population, notably in China and India, still lived in extreme poverty; as extreme poverty became increasingly concentrated in Sub-Saharan Africa over the past decade, the trajectories diverged. The underlying daily consumption levels were about 13 dollars worldwide against 1.80 dollars among the extreme poor in 1990, and 22 dollars against 1.95 dollars in 2026.

Recent growth has not reached the poorest

Historically, from 2000 to 2019, economic growth was positive across nearly the entire income distribution in all six of the bank's regions, and East Asia and the Pacific saw growth above 6 percent a year across most of the distribution. More recently, from 2019 to 2025, growth has been less encouraging: in Sub-Saharan Africa, growth among the poorest was close to zero; in South Asia, poorer households continued to see relatively strong growth; and in the Middle East, North Africa, Afghanistan and Pakistan, consumption at the bottom of the distribution actually declined. The report concludes that delivering on the promise to leave no one behind will require not only faster growth, but growth that delivers meaningful improvements in the living standards of the poorest.