While the percentage of the world’s population living on less than $1 per day has
fallen from 28.3% to 24.0% between 1987 and 1998,population growth (815 million) has kept the absolute number of poor steady at some 1.2 billion.
Nor do World Bank projections lend undivided hope for the future.Under the “business as usual" scenario,the number of poor on the $1 per day scale will not change during the projection period up to 2008.