S02E02: Can we ever beat poverty?

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We've been talking about poverty for a long time, and it still hasn't been resolved. Furthermore, the last two years of pandemic have undone a lot of the previous decades’ progress on poverty alleviation.

We talk to a leading expert on poverty and the pandemic – Achim Steiner, the administrator of the United Nations Development Program. We also look at the role of jobs in relation to poverty and speak to Guy Ryder, the director-general of the International Labor Organization, who estimates the impact of the pandemic on jobs and income to be around four times that of the economic crash of 2008-9.

It wasn’t all bad news in 2021 for poverty alleviation – China declared that it had lifted the last Chinese people out of extreme poverty. The nation has brought over 800 million people out of extreme poverty since launching economic reforms in the 1970s – and the national benchmark used by the Chinese government is slightly higher than the $1.90 day poverty line used by the World Bank to look at poverty globally. We talk to Journalist Luo Liming, a reporter from China Radio International, who gives us his personal perspective growing up in extreme poverty in rural China and how he has seen the face of poverty transform in his lifetime.