Global poverty is one of the very worst and most urgent global justice problems currently facing the world. It presents a great threat to human development and to social, economic and political stability. According to estimates by the World Bank, as of 2018, at least 9% of the world’s people lived in extreme poverty, which is defined as living on only US$1.90 a day or less based on 2011 purchasing power parity (PPP). If we raise it to more moderate poverty lines, roughly 24% of the world’s population live on less than $3.20 a day and 43% on less than $5.50 a day.92 Poverty alleviation is of substantial importance to improving global justice. “Leave no one behind” is the central promise and the rallying cry of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. The past three decades have witnessed remarkable and unprecedented progress toward the goal of poverty alleviation, with the share of the global population living in extreme poverty continuously plunging from 36% in 1990 to less than 10% in 2018. Many national governments, especially those in East Asia and Pacific or South Asia, have invested tremendous efforts to confront poverty and reduce inequality. Meanwhile, continuous economic growth and widespread improvements in well-being in middle-income countries have made great contribu-tions to helping tens of millions of desperately poor people escape poverty every year.
Despite this optimistic picture of world poverty reduction, the fight against global poverty is far from successful, and in certain ways is even getting more challenging.
There are at least three alarming reasons for concern. First, although global poverty rates have been largely decreasing over the past 30 years, the progress of reducing poverty has been very uneven across different regions and countries of the world.
For instance, in Sub-Saharan Africa, the number of extreme poor is unacceptably high and is going to rise further in the coming years, leading to regional concentra-tion of the global poor. Second, the pace of poverty alleviaconcentra-tion is gradually slow-ing down. The poverty reduction effects brought about by economic growth have begun to decrease. The fight against poverty has entered more difficult “deep water areas” where fragile states, poor governance, unresolved conflicts and low-quality infrastructure have become the biggest obstacles to a more equitable and sustain-able society.93 Third, in 2020, the global crisis of the COVID-19 pandemic posts new challenge to poverty governance. The COVID-19 crisis has disproportionally impacted the world’s poor and is estimated to lead to an additional 150 million peo-ple falling into extreme poverty over the next 2 years.94 This will be the first time in over 20 years that the world will see more new poor than the number of people lifted out of poverty. Growing poverty could cause social tensions, induce political
92 World Bank. (2020).
93 World Bank (2018).
94 See https:// www. world bank. org/ en/ news/ press- relea se/ 2020/ 10/ 07/ covid- 19- to- add- as- many- as- 150- milli on- extre me- poor- by- 2021 (accessed December 27, 2020).
conflicts and jeopardize human development in areas such as health, education and mortality. All the above issues make the fight against poverty a more urgent and challenging global project, in which nation-states should shoulder more responsibili-ties and make more contributions. Without comprehensive plans and swift, signifi-cant and substantial policy actions by individual countries, years of achievement in poverty reduction will likely soon be erased. This anti-poverty sub-index, as part of the global justice index, is designed to evaluate individual countries’ efforts and per-formance in poverty reduction, as a means to improve global justice.
3.7.2 Dimensions and Indicators
Poverty is a state in which a person lacks a commonly acceptable amount of finan-cial resources and essentials for a minimum standard of living in a particular place.
It centers on material deprivations and the inability to satisfy their basic needs. Pov-erty is closely related to, but must be treated differently frominequality and vulner-ability. Inequality emphasizes income or welfare distribution within the whole pop-ulation; it is often measured by the Gini index. Vulnerability highlights the risk of falling into poverty in the future, which is often influenced by external shocks such as a financial crisis, a natural disaster, or a pandemic.95 This sub-index is focused on assessing individual countries’ performance in and contribution to global poverty reduction, referring to their achievements in helping the poor to meet basic needs.
Therefore, the sub index will restrict itself from stretching its key concept of poverty too much to include dimensions of inequality and vulnerability. Of course, that is by no means to say that inequality and vulnerability are not as important as the problem of poverty; they are certainly of great significance to enhancing social justice. How-ever, given its theoretical definitions, this project will concentrate on the issue area of absolute poverty, measuring and comparing individual countries’ contribution to global justice in the domain of protecting the most vulnerable and satisfying peo-ple’s minimum essential needs.
Although the theoretical and conceptual underpinnings of poverty measurement are anchored in social sciences,96 measuring and comparing nation states’ perfor-mance in poverty governance is still a big challenge. There is no single commonly accepted way to operationalize poverty measurement. Governments around the world have adopted their own indigenous methods to evaluate poverty and set pov-erty thresholds so as to serve their policy purposes and political aspirations. As a consequence, big cross-national variations can be observed in poverty survey meth-ods, the indicators used, the types of data collected and the ways data are aggre-gated, thus making it notoriously difficult, if not impossible, to make comparisons of poverty governance across countries and across time. Moreover, there are two basic approaches to considering and measuring poverty. One is to take a “thin”
95 Jonathan Haughton and Shahidur R. Khandker. 2009. Handbook of Poverty and Inequality. Washing-ton, DC: World Bank. P.2.
96 David Brady and Linda M. Burton eds. 2016. Oxford Handbook of the Social Science of Poverty.
New York: Oxford University Press.
perspective on poverty by measuring it through defining a threshold of individuals’
income or consumption below which people are considered as poor. The other is to take a “thick” perspective of poverty by defining it as the command over various specific types of goods such as food, education, health care, longevity and employ-ment. The former is monetarily valued and based on a well-established poverty threshold, such as the measurement used by the World Bank. The latter is often non-monetary and relies on a sophisticated set of indicators,97 for example the Human Development Index (HDI) and the Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI).98
Based on the goods-based conception of global justice and the principle of CDDR (as elaborated in our concept paper), we assume that efforts to combat global poverty should respect the action of individual countries involved in improving the living conditions for the least advantaged within their respective jurisdictions.
Therefore, to assess the contributions made by each country to global poverty eradi-cation, we measure their progress in poverty reduction by focusing on two thematic indictors: (1) poverty rate reduction, which measures the “contribution” dimension;
and (2) poverty gap, which measures the “performance” dimension.99 Doing so achieves a middle ground between a single indicator of poverty measurement (the
“thin” approach) and a sophisticated set of indicators for multidimensional measure-ment (the “thick” approach).100 In addition, the present sub-index of anti-poverty is only one of the ten issue areas used to construct the final global justice index.
Many indicators included in multidimensional poverty measurement have already be assessed in other issue areas, such as education, public health and protection of women and children.
The World Bank is the main source of globally comparable data on global pov-erty101 and it has defined the widely agreed-upon “International Poverty Line”.
These poverty lines are set as a scale, ranging from extreme to moderate levels. It is important to emphasize that the international threshold of extreme poverty (con-sumption expenditure at $1.9 per day in 2011 PPP) is mainly based on and reflects the situations in some of the poorest countries, which is too low to gain a compara-ble sense of poverty in all countries of the world. In 2017, the World Bank supple-mented the international extreme poverty lines with two new ones, tracking global poverty at $3.20 a day (the line for lower-middle-income countries) and $5.50 a day (for upper-middle-income countries). In order to ensure the comparability, cover-age and quality of the poverty measurement data, we use the international poverty line at $5.50 a day (see table 7.1). This higher-valued poverty threshold not only covers most underdeveloped countries but also includes many upper-middle-income
97 Scholars have argued that some aspects of well-being cannot be priced using a single dimension.
Amartya See Sen. 1985. Commodities and Capabilities. Amsterdam: North-Holland.
98 Alkire et al. (2014).
99 Individual countries’ international commitment to reduce global poverty in other poor countries and regions is assessed by “humanitarian aid” in our project.
100 For related discussions, see Ferreira, Francisco H. G., and María Ana Lugo. 2013. “Multidimensional Poverty Analysis: Looking for a Middle Ground.” World Bank Research Observer 28 (2): 220–35.
101 The R package povcalnetR provides an API for the data retrieving.
countries and high-income economies, which is more relevant to current economic condition and makes the global comparisons possible.
However, the World Bank data suffer severe problems of missing values, with data appearing in certain years and missing in other years. Technical approaches can be applied to address some of the data shortcomings. More specifically, we use trends in GDP or national poverty statistics to impute missing poverty esti-mates by the World Bank.102 In order to construct the sub-index, we calculate the ranking score by assessing poverty governance in two dimensions: (1) contribu-tion, which is measured by poverty rate reduccontribu-tion, referring to the extent to which a country’s effort in reducing poverty in a given year has improved compared with the year before; (2) performance, which is measured by poverty gap, representing the achievement a country has made in poverty reduction (see Table 16). The data sources currently available limited our ability to rank all nation-states, but we did our best to cover as many countries as possible.
3.7.3 Results
Following the index construction processes and methods developed by this project (see the methodological section), this sub-index ranks 154 countries from 2010 to 2018 according to their level of performance in and contribution to global justice in the issue area of anti-poverty (see Table 17).
The second decade of the twenty-first century has witnessed great progress in reducing global poverty, with an unprecedented number of people around the world being lifted above basic needs. According to the World Bank, in 2010, about 54%
of the world population was living on less than US$5.50 a day. By 2018, this figure had fallen to approximately 43%, compared with roughly 24% and slightly less than 10%, respectively, living below the US$3.20 and US$1.90 poverty lines. Meanwhile, the poverty gap at US$5.50 a day, which reflects the intensity of poverty in a nation, decreased from 0.27 in 2010 to estimated 0.19 in 2018. However, millions of indi-viduals are still trapped in poverty and suffer from life challenges, not only in low-income countries but also in middle-low-income and even high-low-income countries.
Despite having reduced considerably, progress in poverty alleviation has been very uneven. The countries in East Asia (especially China) experienced the largest reductions in the proportion of people living on less than US$5.50 a day (Fig. 14).
However, in comparison, more than two-thirds of the population in Africa are still living below the same threshold. Moreover, although steady progress has been made
102 If there are survey years before and after the missing year, we impute the missing year with linear splines. Suppose l is an income/consumption level. y1 and y2 are survey years, and y is our interested missing year, where y1<y<y2 . Denote p(l,y) as the proportion of people whose income/consumption the survey years on the one side of the missing year, we use GDP as an auxiliary information in the imputation. To be specific, people’s income/consumption is assumed to be linear in the GDP. Suppose that GDP rises by 5%. By our assumption, all people’s income/consumption increase 5%. In this sce-nario, the whole income/consumption distribution curve shrifts. We impute missing values by calculating poverty statistics from the new distribution.
towards the US$5.50 a day threshold, a slower pace in poverty reduction at this higher line is observed compared to the thresholds of US$1.90 a day and US$3.20 a day.103 This illustrates that as the world has grown richer, fighting extreme pov-erty is not sufficient for people to live a life free of povpov-erty, and the task of povpov-erty alleviation becomes even more difficult if we set the goals higher. In addition, the year 2018 brought some new challenges to global poverty governance, including the conflicts and violence in Syria, Afghanistan, Yemen, Democratic Republic of the Congo and the Central African Republic, economic crises in Venezuela and some Southern European countries, as well as rising sea levels and temperatures caused by the changing climate all constitute main drivers of the slow-down in global pov-erty reduction. Therefore, as we celebrate remarkable successes in lifting millions of people out of poverty, we must realize that more challenges lie before us and some of these challenges may even lead to a reversal of poverty reduction.
According to the anti-poverty index constructed in this project (seetable 7.2), China is leading the world in promoting global justice in the issue area of pov-erty alleviation, a position it has maintained since 2011. The povpov-erty headcount rate at US$5.50 a day in China dramatically dropped from 53.4% to 18.9%, with the poverty gap simultaneously falling from 1.67 to 0.771. This may not be surpris-ing given the fact that the rapid and continuous economic growth in China over the past decade has lifted millions out of poverty. More importantly, this tremendous progress is also attributed to the huge investment and efforts made by the Chinese government in poverty eradication. Over the past few years, the Chinese govern-ment’s efforts against poverty have greatly intensified as the leadership of President Xi Jinping proposed an ambitious campaign of “targeted poverty alleviation”, as one of four “tough battles”, to eliminate absolute poverty and build a moderately prosperous society by the end of 2020.104 Based on China’s national poverty thresh-old, the number of people living in absolute poverty nationwide has decreased from
Table 16 Data on anti-poverty
Category Indicator Data source Coverage
Contribution Poverty rate reduction
($5.5, population weighted) World Bank 154 countries (145 countries have no
missing values; 9 coun-tries have 1 ~ 4 missing values)
Performance Poverty gap ($5.5) World Bank 154 countries (145 countries have no
missing values; 9 coun-tries have 1 ~ 4 missing values)
103 World Bank (2020).
104 Zuo, Cai, Zeng Qingjie & Wang Zhongyuan 2020, Farewell to Poverty: The Institutional Founda-tions of Poverty Reduction in China [Gaobie Pinkun: Jingzhun Fupin De Zhidu Mima], Shanghai: Fudan University Press.
Table 17 Country ranking in anti-poverty aspect of promoting global justice
Country Name 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018
China 33 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1
Iceland 2 13 10 11 9 2 2 2 2
Switzerland 5 2 3 2 3 3 3 3 3
Azerbaijan 1 4 4 3 4 4 4 4 4
Cyprus 11 8 2 7 6 13 6 5 5
Slovenia 16 12 15 17 14 14 10 7 6
Norway 3 6 7 6 7 5 5 6 7
Belgium 17 14 16 14 8 7 7 8 8
France 7 9 9 12 12 6 8 9 9
Netherlands 9 5 11 8 18 19 9 10 10
Czechia 22 23 24 15 27 18 24 18 11
Austria 8 19 18 5 20 12 12 12 12
Malta 14 10 17 9 2 8 11 11 13
Luxembourg 13 7 8 4 5 10 14 13 14
Finland 10 3 12 10 11 9 13 14 15
Germany 6 11 13 13 10 11 15 15 16
Denmark 4 25 6 19 23 16 16 16 17
Ireland 24 22 23 27 21 17 19 19 18
Australia 15 17 14 16 15 15 17 17 19
Slovakia 20 21 21 20 22 23 23 25 20
United Kingdom of Great Britain
and Northern Ireland 23 15 5 18 13 25 18 20 21
Croatia 19 20 22 21 24 22 21 21 22
Canada 12 18 19 24 17 21 22 22 23
Sweden 21 16 20 23 19 20 20 23 24
Belarus 32 32 28 25 16 27 26 27 25
United States of America 26 27 27 28 28 28 28 24 26
Japan 18 24 25 22 25 24 25 26 27
Republic of Korea 25 26 26 26 26 26 27 28 28
Poland 39 37 38 39 41 37 29 30 29
Italy 29 28 30 29 29 29 30 29 30
Hungary 35 33 33 35 33 32 33 31 31
Spain 28 29 29 31 30 31 31 32 32
Malaysia 45 43 41 34 35 34 34 34 33
Portugal 30 31 36 36 34 30 32 33 34
Russian Federation 31 30 31 30 31 35 35 35 35
Bosnia and Herzegovina 34 34 34 37 36 36 37 36 36
Lithuania 41 40 40 40 40 39 39 38 37
Latvia 42 42 42 42 43 42 42 40 38
Montenegro 37 41 44 51 42 40 38 37 39
Lebanon NA NA NA 32 32 33 36 39 40
Israel 36 36 35 38 37 38 40 41 41
Uruguay 43 38 39 41 39 41 41 42 42
Table 17 (continued)
Country Name 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018
Thailand 53 51 54 53 53 44 47 44 43
Bulgaria 40 44 43 46 45 45 44 45 44
Greece 27 35 37 44 44 43 43 43 45
Serbia 49 52 53 54 51 47 49 47 46
Seychelles 48 47 46 47 47 46 48 46 47
Ukraine 38 39 32 33 38 52 46 48 48
Estonia 47 49 48 50 48 48 50 49 49
Kazakhstan 56 45 47 43 46 49 52 51 50
Iran (Islamic Republic of) 44 46 45 45 55 53 45 50 51
Chile 52 53 51 48 49 50 53 53 52
Turkey 50 48 52 49 50 54 51 52 53
Costa Rica 46 50 50 52 52 51 54 54 54
Mauritius 57 57 57 58 58 57 57 55 55
Republic of North Macedonia 51 55 56 56 57 55 56 57 56
Panama 54 54 55 57 56 56 55 56 57
Republic of Moldova 70 66 67 61 62 58 59 58 58
Romania 64 65 65 69 65 63 60 59 59
Dominican Republic 68 69 72 73 69 64 62 62 60
Paraguay 62 61 58 59 59 59 58 61 61
Brazil 55 56 49 55 54 60 63 60 63
Bolivia (Plurinational State of) 60 59 59 60 61 61 61 64 64
Viet Nam 73 89 80 81 78 74 70 67 65
Peru 61 62 60 62 64 62 65 65 66
Ecuador 66 64 64 67 63 65 64 66 67
Tonga 67 67 68 72 72 69 67 68 68
Tunisia 72 70 69 71 70 71 71 71 69
Colombia 69 68 70 70 68 68 69 70 70
Palestinian Territories 59 60 62 64 66 67 68 69 71
Jordan 58 58 61 65 67 70 72 72 72
Mongolia 83 74 66 63 60 72 80 77 73
Morocco 86 76 77 78 76 76 78 73 74
El Salvador 76 81 78 77 79 78 74 74 75
Albania 89 90 93 95 87 85 83 79 76
Jamaica 71 71 73 74 75 77 75 76 77
Algeria 75 74 75 73 75 78
Gabon 91 86 81 82 81 81 79 78 79
Mexico 74 73 75 84 93 80 77 81 80
Central African Republic 88 88 92 76 77 79 81 82 81
Tuvalu NA 93 97 98 98 86 87 85 82
Burundi 82 83 84 88 88 84 84 84 83
Madagascar 75 75 76 79 80 82 82 83 84
India 130 96 99 113 103 99 91 89 85
Table 17 (continued)
Country Name 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018
Honduras 78 79 90 92 90 94 86 86 86
Venezuela (Bolivarian Republic of) 63 63 63 66 71 73 76 80 87
Samoa 85 78 88 93 96 91 85 87 88
Bhutan 98 97 94 96 95 93 92 90 89
Armenia 141 140 132 131 115 110 101 95 90
Sri Lanka 125 120 112 111 104 100 95 93 91
Democratic Republic of the Congo 65 72 74 80 82 83 88 88 92
Georgia 115 109 106 100 99 101 102 98 93
Botswana 92 91 89 87 85 90 93 94 94
Malawi 80 77 79 83 83 87 90 91 95
Namibia 96 98 95 97 94 89 89 92 96
Guatemala 77 82 85 91 97 95 96 97 97
Zambia 79 80 82 85 86 88 94 96 98
South Africa 90 92 91 94 92 96 99 99 99
Lesotho 81 84 87 90 91 98 100 100 100
Fiji 108 106 107 108 110 103 104 103 101
Mozambique 87 85 86 89 89 97 98 101 102
Guinea-Bissau 84 87 83 86 84 92 97 102 103
Maldives 104 103 105 103 100 105 107 105 104
Cabo Verde 97 100 98 101 105 104 105 106 105
Tajikistan 131 132 131 128 116 116 113 107 106
Indonesia 111 121 134 123 128 128 103 104 107
Ghana 116 112 109 109 112 113 114 109 108
Comoros 102 105 104 105 106 106 108 110 109
Eswatini 100 101 102 104 107 108 110 111 110
Benin 101 104 101 102 101 102 106 108 111
Cameroon 117 114 110 110 111 109 111 112 112
Nigeria 99 102 103 107 109 112 117 114 113
Philippines 124 127 127 122 123 123 119 118 114
Congo 109 110 108 112 113 114 118 116 115
Togo 95 99 100 106 108 111 116 117 116
Nicaragua 123 125 118 116 114 115 115 113 117
Yemen 143 144 145 148 144 141 132 122 118
Rwanda 93 94 96 99 102 107 112 115 119
Chad 112 115 116 117 119 119 121 120 120
Uganda 114 116 122 130 125 120 122 121 121
Zimbabwe NA NA 119 121 121 121 123 123 122
Myanmar NA NA NA NA NA NA 141 135 123
Angola 120 124 121 120 120 122 125 124 124
Sudan 135 131 117 124 124 117 120 119 125
Papua New Guinea NA 123 125 125 127 127 126 125 126
Sierra Leone 110 113 128 138 138 118 124 127 127
98.99 million at the end of 2012 to 5.51 million at the end of 2019, with the poverty headcount being reduced by more than 10 million annually for seven consecutive years. UN Secretary-General António Guterres called China’s success as “the great-est anti-poverty achievement in history”.105 Although many obstacles remain ahead of China’s efforts to attain its ambitious goal and maintain its sustainable success, the country has presented the world with a role model in a sense that the govern-ment takes up its responsibility to help impoverished people. In 2018, the Chinese government launched a “Global Poverty Reduction & Inclusive Growth Platform”106 to promote the exchange of experience and knowledge sharing on poverty reduction
Table 17 (continued)
Country Name 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018
Liberia 103 108 115 134 136 135 133 130 128
Kenya 118 118 120 119 122 126 127 128 129
Micronesia (Federated States of) 113 117 123 132 131 131 130 129 130
Mauritania 122 126 126 129 126 132 135 132 131
Egypt 145 148 149 153 149 144 143 142 132
Iraq 132 135 133 126 135 138 109 126 133
Niger 105 119 124 127 130 130 131 131 134
Cote d’Ivoire 126 129 130 135 133 134 137 136 135
Mali 119 122 114 114 117 125 129 133 136
United Republic of Tanzania 106 107 111 115 118 124 128 134 137
Senegal 127 128 129 133 132 133 136 138 138
Haiti NA NA NA 136 134 136 138 139 139
Kiribati 139 143 141 141 143 139 140 140 140
Burkina Faso 107 111 113 118 129 129 134 137 141
Ethiopia 136 136 135 137 137 137 139 141 142
Vanuatu 137 139 140 139 140 142 143 143
Timor-Leste 133 138 140 144 147 148 149 145 144
Solomon Islands 128 133 137 143 140 142 144 144 145
Gambia 129 134 136 139 141 145 145 146 146
Nepal 140 146 147 150 150 150 151 148 147
Uzbekistan 134 139 144 147 146 146 147 147 148
Guinea 121 130 138 142 142 143 146 149 149
Lao People’s Democratic Republic 138 142 143 145 145 147 148 150 150
Pakistan 146 149 150 152 153 152 152 153 151
Bangladesh 144 145 146 149 151 151 153 152 152
Sao Tome and Principe 137 141 142 146 148 149 150 151 153
Kyrgyzstan 142 147 148 151 152 153 154 154 154
105 See https:// www. un. org/ press/ en/ 2019/ sgsm1 9779. doc. htm (Accessed December 20, 2020).
106 See http:// south. iprcc. org. cn/# (Accessed December 20, 2020).
with the rest of the world. European states and other OECD countries also have made great contributions to global justice in the domain of poverty reduction. This largely results from their relatively high income levels and stable economic develop-ment, as well as their income distribution policies and social welfare projects.
Among the ten countries ranked top in 2018 (see Fig. 15), three belong to Asia (including China, Azerbaijan, and Cyprus) and seven are in Europe (including Ice-land, SwitzerIce-land, Slovenia, Norway, Belgium, France and the Netherlands). The above world map shows the ranking of all observed countries in 2018. Compared with the results for 2017 in our last annual report, the change is obvious. This is largely due to changes in the way the anti-poverty sub-index is constructed and
Fig. 14 The world’s poverty headcount rate and poverty gap in 2010–2018
Fig. 15 2018 Index ranking of anti-poverty on a world map
measured. The 2018 index focuses only on absolute poverty and does not include the Gini coefficient, an indicator of relative poverty. In doing so, it is more reflective of the contribution and performance of individual countries in promoting global jus-tice by addressing the basic needs of humankind. With the optimization of our index construction methods, it is normal for ranking fluctuations to occur between years.
Among the bottom-ranked are developing countries in Africa, Asia and the Pacific region. In these underdeveloped countries, more than half of the civil-ian population are living in conditions far below the international poverty thresh-old of the US$5.50 a day. For example, in Kyrgyzstan, the poverty headcount rate has been higher than 64% and the poverty gap has stayed larger than 2.45 over the past 9 years. In Bangladesh, the poverty headcount rate reached a peak of 87.73% in 2010 and it has slowly decreased to 79.31% during the past decade. However, at the
Among the bottom-ranked are developing countries in Africa, Asia and the Pacific region. In these underdeveloped countries, more than half of the civil-ian population are living in conditions far below the international poverty thresh-old of the US$5.50 a day. For example, in Kyrgyzstan, the poverty headcount rate has been higher than 64% and the poverty gap has stayed larger than 2.45 over the past 9 years. In Bangladesh, the poverty headcount rate reached a peak of 87.73% in 2010 and it has slowly decreased to 79.31% during the past decade. However, at the