China targets eliminating extreme poverty within China by 2020

The Chinese government will enact more support policies to lift the country’s 70 million poor people above the poverty line by 2020, President Xi Jinping pledged on Friday ahead of the 23rd International Day for the Eradication of Poverty.

The government will take all necessary steps to achieve the poverty reduction goal, including lifting 10 million people out of poverty by the end of this year, he said.

Among the steps, Hong told a news conference in Beijing, the government will beef up subsidizing banks to provide loans of less than 50,000 yuan ($ 7,900) as seed funds to help families in poverty-stricken areas to start their own businesses. Additionally, because 42 percent of poor households are impoverished due to medical issues affecting family members, governments at all levels will improve the social security network, especially the healthcare system.

Moreover, the government will help about 10 million poor villagers who live in geographical areas considered not suitable for living to move out and resettle before 2020, Hong said.

China will move some industries to help with jobs in some areas and they will move poor communities out of areas with poor farmland and poor resources.

In 2014, China’s rural poverty line was 2,300 yuan a year, or 6.3 yuan a day. At today’s exchange rates that is only about $1.03, which would seem much meaner than the World Bank’s line of $1.25. But the Bank’s poverty line is calculated at purchasing-power parity exchange rates, not market exchange rates. To the World Bank, someone is suffering from extreme poverty if they consume less than what $1.25 could buy in America in 2005. To the Chinese government, a rural person is poor if they earn less than what 6.3 yuan could buy in rural China in 2010. China’s poverty line was equivalent to $1.77 in America in 2005.

The number of people in the World living in extreme poverty around the world is likely to fall to under 10 percent of the global population in 2015, according to World Bank projections released today, giving fresh evidence that a quarter-century-long sustained reduction in poverty is moving the world closer to the historic goal of ending poverty by 2030.

The Bank uses an updated international poverty line of US $1.90 a day, which incorporates new information on differences in the cost of living across countries (the PPP exchange rates). The new line preserves the real purchasing power of the previous line (of $1.25 a day in 2005 prices) in the world’s poorest countries. Using this new line (as well as new country-level data on living standards), the World Bank projects that global poverty will have fallen from 902 million people or 12.8 per cent of the global population in 2012 to 702 million people, or 9.6 per cent of the global population, this year.

In its regional forecasts for 2015, the Bank said that poverty in East Asia and the Pacific would fall to 4.1 per cent of its population, down from 7.2 per cent in 2012; Latin America and the Caribbean would fall to 5.6 per cent from 6.2 in 2012; South Asia would fall to 13.5 per cent in 2015, compared to 18.8 per cent in 2012; Sub-Saharan Africa declines to 35.2 per cent in 2015, compared to 42.6 per cent in 2012. Reliable current poverty data is not available for the Middle East and North Africa because of conflict and fragility in key countries in the region

China proposed to help other developing countries in need to increase livelihood with 2 billion US dollar funds from the south-south cooperation fund. And China will unconditionally acquit debt of the least developed countries and small island countries by 2015.