Chapter Highlights •
After a period of vibrant economic growth and significant gains in poverty reduction, the global economy has entered a time of economic uncertainty, and risks to the sustainability of development results appear to be on the rise.
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The World Bank Group needs to help its clients sustain and improve development results under the more adverse environment expected ahead.
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The Bank Group also needs to help its clients address considerable variability in progress across countries.
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Bank Group clients need to deal with increasingly interlinked development issues that call for joint or collective action.
Key Trends in Global Development The 1990s and early 2000s saw considerable progress in poverty reduction. The World Bank estimates that the developing world as a whole achieved the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) of cutting the 1990 rate of extreme poverty in half well ahead of the 2015 deadline. Following successive decades of vigorous economic growth, East Asian countries saw the share of people living on less than $1.25 a day fall from 56 percent in 1990 to 14 percent in 2008. Sub-Saharan Africa also saw a decline, but much smaller: the share of those living on less than $1.25 a day declined from 57 percent in 1990 to 48 percent in 2008 (World Bank 2012c). MDGs relating to broader indicators of well-being progressed in parallel. Both the adult literacy rate and life expectancy have advanced steadily since the mid1980s (figure 1.1). Infant mortality fell from 89 per 1,000 births in 1990 to 60 in 2009, and the share of the population in developing regions with access to safe drinking water increased from 71 percent in 1990 to 84 percent in 2008. Access to basic education has increased: net primary enrollment in developing countries reached 89 percent in 2009, up from 82 percent in 1999. World Bank for Results 2011 (World Bank 2011b) reports that gender parity in primary and secondary education reached 96 percent in 2008 and that the trajectory of the AIDS epidemic has turned, with fewer people newly infected and dying from AIDS-related illness. The accelerated pace of poverty reduction and development has been associated with strong economic growth.1 During much of the first decade of this millennium, developing countries experienced a higher per capita income growth rate than high-income countries (figure 1.2). And developing countries that have reached or are on track to reach the MDG targets are observed to sustain faster average per capita income growth than countries that are far from the targets (World Bank 2011a). Until the global economic crisis struck in 2008, the first years of the 2000s appeared favorable for overall development.
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Results and Performance of the World Bank Group 2012