World poverty declining… Yasukawa

Yoriko Yasukawa, after 35 years at the UN, writes here that poverty is declining:

“And yet we have made some impressive progress despite how deplorable the world may sometimes seem.

Deaths caused by warfare have been on a declining trend following the two World Wars and the number of armed conflicts has also tended downward since the Cold War.

Extreme poverty was more than halved between 1990 and 2015, as have deaths of those under-five years old. Maternal deaths have been cut by 45% and the number of out-of-school children of primary school age by over 40 million.”

Note that most progress takes place in Asia (India and China)… Some might argue that moving toward a free market economy especially in India and China explains the decline…