General
POOREST COUNTRY IN THE WORLD! Nigeria overtakes India
Nigeria has overtaken India as the world’s poorest country in the World Poverty Clock data as recently updated.
Each April and October, the World Poverty Clock data are updated to take into account new household surveys (an additional 97 surveys were made available this April) and new projections on country economic growth from the International Monetary Funds’s World Economic Outlook.
These form the basic building blocks for poverty trajectories computed for 188 countries and territories, developed and developing, across the world.
The data highlight two new storylines about what is happening to global extreme poverty…
First: Extreme poverty in today’s world is largely about Africa
According to our projections, Nigeria has already overtaken India as the country with the largest number of extreme poor in early 2018, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo could soon take over the number 2 spot (Figure 1 below).