Poverty

Sub-Saharan Africa’s economy is set to register another year of solid economic performance, expanding at 4½ percent in 2015. This said, the expansion will be at the lower end of the range registered in recent years, mainly reflecting the adverse impact of the sharp decline in oil and other commodity prices.
The effect of this shock will be quite heterogeneous across the region. The region’s eight oil exporters will be hit hard and, with limited buffers, are expected to effect significant fiscal adjustment, with adverse implications for growth. For much of the rest of the region, near-term prospects remain quite favorable, with many countries benefiting from lower oil prices—although, for a number of them, this positive effect will be part offset by the decline in the prices of other exported commodities. Notable exceptions are South Africa, where growth is expected to remain lackluster, held back by continuing problems in the electricity sector, and Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone, where the Ebola outbreak continues to exact a heavy economic and social toll.

Africa is now the world’s second fastest-growing continent. In this decade of seismic shifts in the global economy, Africa has defied the pessimists, accelerating its economic pulse and seeing significant improvements in its Human Development Indicators. But these positive developments have been tempered by a crisis in jobs, youth unemployment and growing inequality. These are now the challenges. Growth must bring jobs and opportunities for all. That will happen if growth is sustained and leads to the structural change and economic transformation that will enable the continent to join global value chains. It will do this by closing the infrastructure gap, speeding up economic integration, dealing with conflicts old and new, and developing human capital.
This is what makes the next decade so decisive. This is what makes this new Bank Strategy for 2013–2022 so vital.

This report describes the lessons learnt from cases of ‘sustainable intensification’ of agriculture, where farmers have increased food production on existing farmland without putting further pressure on the environment. It uses cases identified by the Foresight project ‘Global food and farming futures’ to demonstrate the potential for high yeild outputs from agriculture in Africa.

Territorial foresight is a structured set of participatory vision building and strategic planning activities that allow regions to think, consider, debate and shape the medium to long-term future of their regions, provinces or cities. Many of the key process elements of foresight are widely used in strategic planning – the formation of expert panels, the use of socio-economic and environmental data consultation, brainstorming, trend and extrapolation and the setting of strategic goals. Foresight, unlike most approaches to strategic planning, deals with long-term prospects, and draws upon the views of multiple stakeholders.
This report analyses the interactions between European strategies and policies, and the activities of the analysed territorial foresights, in order to assess the potential opportunity to create a territorial foresight network or platform at the European level.

The quality of territorial foresight and, in particular, of urban foresight, is nowadays measured not so much in terms of the ability to anticipate possible futures, always challenged by the increasing uncertainty and the exponential rate of change, as in terms of the ability to construct collective visions of the future that are ambitious, proactive and engaging for stakeholders and citizens.
What foresight has to offer is its capacity to approach both long-term challenges, perceived in the present, as well as shared aims and values in a distant horizon. This publication attempts to address these challenges by ‘imagineering’ the future of cities though the application of methods and techniques drawn from the strategic foresight and prediction fields in a systematic, rigorous and holistic way.

For many years now the Committee of the Regions has been building a reputation of being "the EU's Assembly of Regional and Local Representatives".
It decided to contribute to the debate on metropolitan governance by pulling resources together with a long-standing international partner like the Forum of Federations (FoF). The going together with such a renowned global academic network on federalism in this project, provided the CoR with an unprecedented mix of analytical and policy expertise on urban and metropolitan issues to be able to offer to our members and the rest of the EU institutions.

Good governance is based upon foresight that allows decision makers to highlight their choices under a new perspective. The Committee of the Regions (CoR) has turned to forward planning and foresight to react to new political and socioeconomic developments in Europe.
The aim of this report is to identify the future challenges that confront the CoR and the European local and regional authorities (LRAs) at the horizon in 2025. It draws up three possible scenarios with predictions about the future evolution of European integration and the implications for the LRAs and the CoR.
The future evolution of European integration necessarily involves an identification of a number of trends, challenges and opportunities over the coming decades. Subsequently, the report formulates key questions for debate and provides practical options and suggestions on how LRAs can make progress.

This paper identifies and analyses some key challenges that OECD and partner economies may face over the coming 50 years if underlying global trends relating to growth, trade, inequality and environmental pressures prevail. For example, global growth is likely to slow and become increasingly dependent on knowledge and technology, while the economic costs of environmental damages will mount. The rising economic importance of knowledge will tend to raise returns to skills, likely leading to further increases in earning inequalities within countries. While increases in pre-tax earnings do not automatically transform into rising income inequality, the ability of governments to cushion this impact may be limited, as rising trade integration and consequent rising mobility of tax bases combined with substantial fiscal pressures may hamper such efforts. The paper discusses to what extent national structural policies can address these and other interlinked challenges, but also points to the growing need for international coordination and cooperation to deal with these issues over the coming 50 years.

Over a billion people worldwide live on less than $1.25 a day. But that number is falling. This has given credence to the idea that extreme poverty can be eliminated in a generation. A new study by Brookings researchers examines the prospects for ending extreme poverty by 2030 and the factors that will determine progress toward this goal. Below are some of the key findings:

1. We are at a unique point in history where there are more people in the world living right around the $1.25 mark than at any other income level. This implies that equitable growth in the developing world will result in more movement of people across the poverty line than across any other level.

2. Sustaining the trend rate of global poverty reduction requires that each year a new set of individuals is primed to cross the international poverty line. This will become increasingly difficult as some of the poorest of the poor struggle to make enough progress to approach the $1.25 threshold over the next twenty years.

3. The period from 1990 to 2030 resembles a relay race in which responsibility for leading the charge on global poverty reduction passes between China, India and sub-Saharan Africa. China has driven progress over the last twenty years, but with its poverty rate now down in the single digits, the baton is being passed to India. India has the capacity to deliver sustained progress on global poverty reduction over the next decade based on modest assumptions of equitable growth. Once India’s poverty is largely exhausted, it will be up to sub-Saharan Africa to run the final relay leg and bring the baton home. This poses a significant challenge as most of Africa’s poor people start a long way behind the poverty line.

4. As global poverty approaches zero, it becomes increasingly concentrated in countries where the record of and prospects for poverty reduction are weakest. Today, a third of the world’s poor live in fragile states but this share could rise to half in 2018 and nearly two-thirds in 2030.

5. The World Bank has recently set a goal to reduce extreme poverty around the world to under 3 percent by 2030. It is unlikely that this goal can be achieved by stronger than expected growth across the developing world, or greater income equality within each developing country, alone. Both factors are needed simultaneously.

The data available for assessing the current status and trends of global poverty has significantly improved. And yet serious contentions remain. At the same time, a set of recent papers has sought to use these datasets to make poverty projections. Such projections have significant policy implications because they are used to inform debates on the future scale, nature, and objectives of international aid. Unfortunately, those papers have not yielded a consistent picture of future (and even current) global poverty even though their estimates are all derived from the same basic (PPP and distribution) datasets. In this paper we introduce a new model of growth, inequality and poverty. This new model allows for systematic, methodologically transparent, comparative analyses of estimates of poverty in the future based on a range of different methods. We use the model to explore how estimates of the scale and location of future poverty varies by approach.