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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 March 2025
The World Bank's “International Poverty Line,” a politically driven standard, obscures the reality that, in East Asia as elsewhere, poverty is increasing alongside enormous wealth for the richest ten percent. The COVID-19 pandemic is driving tens of millions more people into poverty in East Asia than would otherwise be the case, challenging all governments to meet the crisis where it most counts: in health care, food, aid to small businesses, and income. For that to happen, however, requires a dramatically different approach to economic globalization by governments and international lending agencies. Two events, the COVID-19 pandemic and the climate crisis, are playing havoc with efforts by international organizations to reduce poverty. The United Nations, the World Health Organization, and numerous nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) are all engaged in poverty-reduction programs, but the World Bank stands out for obstructing a clearer understanding not just of how poverty should be defined, but also of what it takes to lift people out of it.
1 See the full report.
2 World Bank, “Macro Poverty Outlook,” n.d.
3 Carmen Reinhart and Vincent Reinhart, “The Pandemic Depression,” Foreign Affairs, September-October 2020.
4 See this report.
5 See this report.
6 C.A. Phillips, A. Caldas, R. Cleetus et al., “Compound Climate Risks in the COVID-19 Pandemic,” Nature Climate Change (2020).
7 Arif Husain, “After the Pandemic, a Global Hunger Crisis,” New York Times, June 12, 2020.
8 Netherlands Institute of International Relations, “World Climate and Security Report 2020,” February 13, 2020.
9 United Nations Development Programme, Human Development Report 2009; United Nations Development Programme, Human Development Report 2019.
10 Economists seems to consider that the worst cases of inequality as measured by the Gini coefficient are Brazil (53.3 between 2010 and 2017) and South Africa (63.0). In that case, none of the nine East Asian countries examined here comes close, with the range from Malaysia (41.0) to South Korea (31.6). Human Development Report 2019, Table 3.
11 Only in Thailand did the income share of the richest 1 percent exceed that of the poorest 40 percent. However, no figures were reported for the Philippines, Indonesia, and Vietnam. Human Development Report 2019, Table 3.
12 Compiled from the New York Times coronavirus data set. The additional countries and territories are Singapore, Hong Kong, New Zealand, Cambodia, Taiwan, and Myanmar.
13 World Bank, “East Asia and the Pacific in the Time of COVID-19.”
14 World Bank, “Global Economic Prospects,” June 2020.
15 Ellie Wong, Carolyn Kabore, and Angeline Manzara, “Out of Time,” Devpolicy, July 10, 2020.
16 Bihong Huang, Peter J. Morgan, and Naoyuki Yoshino, eds., Demystifying Rising Inequality in Asia (Tokyo: Asian Development Bank Institute, 2019, pp. 1-5.
17 Robert Reich, “State of Disunion: Democrats Must Not Give In to Trump's Hateful Speech,” The Guardian, February 4, 2019.
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