WASHINGTON, April 15, 2007 Global poverty rates continued to fall in the first four years of the 21^st century according to new estimates published in the World Development Indicators 2007, released today. The proportion of people living on less than $1 a day fell to 18.4 percent in 2004, leaving an estimated 985 million people living in extreme poverty. By comparison, the total number of extreme poor was 1.25 billion in 1990. Two-dollar-a-day poverty rates are falling too, but an estimated 2.6 billion people, almost half the population of the developing world, were still living below that level in 2004.

Developing countries have averaged a solid 3.9 percent annual growth in GDP per capita a year since 2000, which contributed to rapidly falling poverty rates in all developing regions over the past few years. Another key reason dollar-a-day poverty fell by over 260 million between 1990 and 2004 was China's massive poverty reduction over that period. Indeed, East Asia's extreme poverty rate dropped to 9 percent in 2004.

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