Buoyed by rapid economic growth, Asia has made dramatic progress in the eradication of extreme poverty and hunger, halving the number of people living on the equivalent of a dollar a day, a just released United Nations report has said.
The United Nations report comes at the midpoint of a 15-year effort to implement the Millennium Development Goals, a set of eight key objectives set by the world leaders aimed at eliminating or drastically reducing several social and economic ills.
On the negative side, the report finds that Asia went off track for meeting goals in several other areas, including child malnutrition, gender equality and women's empowerment and in the health sector.
The greatest gain was in Eastern Asia, where the proportion of people living in extreme poverty fell from 33 per cent in 1990 to 9.9 per cent in 2004. In South-Eastern Asia, where extreme poverty was already down to 20.8 per cent in 1990, the percentage had dropped to 6.8 per cent by 2004.
The report said the figures put the region comfortably on track to achieve the first Millennium Development Goal, which calls for a 50 per cent reduction in extreme poverty and hunger by 2015.
But the report said Asia's unprecedented poverty reduction was accompanied by evidence that the benefits of economic growth are not being shared across different parts of the continent.
In Southern Asia, almost 30 per cent of the population was still living