2015 was a year of major milestones, emerging trends, and new beginnings. Among other things, 2015 marked a historic drop in poverty, a major climate change agreement, and record low child and maternal mortality rates.
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The share of the world’s population living in extreme poverty is projected to hit a historic low of 9.6% of in 2015 – falling from 37.1% in 1990, Donna Barne and Tariq Khokhar write for The World Bank.
New estimates show 702 million people living below the updated global poverty line of $1.90 per day, with the majority of them in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia.
The milestone was hailed as the “best news in the world today†by World Bank Group President Jim Yong Kim, and marks real progress on the road to ending extreme poverty by 2030.
Representatives of 195 nations signed on to the landmark Paris climate agreement on Dec. 12, 2015. Each country pledged to lower greenhouse gas emissions in what could mark a turning point in the global effort to slow climate change. The deal recognized the role of incentives in reducing emissions, including carbon pricing.
As part of the Paris deal, more than 90 developed and developing countries have included carbon-pricing schemes among the actions they intend to take.
The decline in commodity prices that began with metals and agriculture four years ago - joined by crude oil in mid-2014 - continued in 2015.
According to the Commodity Markets Outlook, energy, metals, and agricultural prices were down this year, in part due to increasing supplies, bumper harvests, weak demand and a stronger U.S. dollar.
More than 60% of the World’s Economies Improved Business Rules. The 2016 Edition of Doing Business identified 231 reforms that enhanced business activity in 122 countries around the world.
For example, data for the past 12 years show that in 2003, it took an average of 51 days worldwide to start a new business. This has now been more than halved to 20 days.
In addition, the data shows encouraging signs of convergence toward best practices, as lower-income economies have shown more improvement than high-income economies over time.
Maternal and child mortality rates hit record lows. Between 1990 and 2015, the under-5 and maternal mortality rates fell 53% and 44% respectively. This means the number of children dying before age 5 has fallen dramatically - from 12.7 million in 1990 to 5.9 million in 2015.
The bottom 40% are doing better. Rising incomes over the past decade have helped the bottom 40% of the population in many countries.
Considering five-year periods starting about 2007 and ending around 2012, incomes of the bottom 40% grew in 65 of the 94 countries with adequate and comparable data.
Among them, 47 countries registered a “shared prosperity premium,†with the incomes of the bottom 40% growing faster than the incomes of the average population, thus reducing income inequality between these groups. ■