The World Bank has published a list of countries that have made significant efforts to reduce extreme poverty from 2000 to 2015. Pakistan has been listed among the countries where poverty reduction has been most successful.

According to the World Bank, poverty is defined as living on less than $1.90 in 2011 per day per capita. Pakistan has witnessed a decline of 1.8 in percentage points during the period of study.

“The countries had vastly different poverty rates at the turn of the century—the extreme poverty rate ranged from 94.1% in DRC (2004) to 28.6% in Pakistan (2001)”, the World Bank wrote in its blog.

Tanzania tops the list of countries that have successfully eradicated extreme poverty with a 3.2% point change in poverty from 2000 to 2011, Tajikistan and Chad come at second and third with 3.1% whereas Congo has reduced poverty by 2.7%. Below are the top 15 countries in the list:

According to the data, Pakistan has lifted 33.8 million people from extreme poverty during these years.

The data was extracted from PovcalNet with the below criteria:

Countries should have at least two surveys—one between 1995 and 2005 and another between 2010 and 2019. The same welfare measures, either income or consumption, should be used for those surveys. Applying these restrictions, 114 countries were selected, including high-income countries.

China has taken 493.8 million people out of extreme poverty whereas the number stands at 161.7 million for India, where 268.1 million people were still in extreme poverty as of 2015.

What are your thoughts on the extreme poverty alleviation in Pakistan? Let us know in the comments section.