Prospect of Development Assistance: New Trends of Poverty and Inequality

Although the number of people under the absolute poverty line has been dramatically reduced, there are still various challenges in poverty reduction. Inequality is growing in many middle income countries. The very poor people in some middle income countries are poorer than those in low income countries. The international society has to pay more attention to them. Many low income countries have succeeded in poverty reduction but not in economic growth since mid-1990s. In those countries, the ratio of the income of the bottom decile to the national average is getting closer to one-to-three, where most developing countries cannot go beyond that ratio. The low income countries needs pro-poor growth to maintain successful poverty reduction. The poor in rich countries and the rich in poor (middle income) countries are getting overlapped. Country-to-country development assistance could be less reasonable if the overlap become larger. The innovative schemes of development financing have various possibilities of additional financial mobilization. But more importantly, some of them provide alternative frameworks who are supposed to share the burden of the global poverty reduction.