The world’s poorest countries have experienced a brutal decade

But here are some startling facts. Almost all of the progress in the fight against poverty was achieved in the first 15 years of the 2000s (see chart 1). Indeed, in 2022 just one-third as many people left extreme poverty as in 2013. Progress on infectious diseases, which thrive in the poorest countries, has slowed sharply. If the share of people contracting malaria, in countries that have the disease, had continued to fall at the same pace as from 2000 to 2012, there would have been half as many cases as there in fact were in 2022. Developing-world childhood mortality plummeted from 79 to 42 deaths per 1,000 births between 2000 and 2016. Yet by 2022 the figure had dropped only a little more, to 37. The share of primary-school-aged children at school in low-income countries froze at 81% in 2015, having risen from 56% in 2000. Poverty is a thing of the past in much of Europe and South-East Asia; in much of Africa it looks more ingrained than it has in decades.