Given the higher incidence of poverty based on country-specific or "national" poverty lines, some indication of trends in poverty based on such figures would be useful. Poverty estimates based on country-specific poverty lines in 12 selected countries of the Asian region indicate that with the exception of Mongolia, Nepal and Sri Lanka, poverty was declining in the remaining nine countries during the 1980s and early 1990s. During the 1990s however poverty has increased in Indonesia, Mongolia, Pakistan and Thailand and remained constant in Nepal, while no comparable figures are available for Sri Lanka. What is more, the rate of poverty reduction has slowed during the 1990s in Bangladesh, India, the Philippines and Korea. In the event, in six of the 12 countries, the number of income poor in the last reported survey relating to the 1990s was higher in the immediately preceding survey. Thus, trends in the incidence of poverty as revealed by the country-specific figures tally with the idea that during the 1990s, which were the years of globalisation, the advance registered in the war against poverty in some parts of the Asia-Pacific has either weakened or been partially reversed.
Table 3 >>

Basic Needs Indicators
Measures of consumption poverty implicitly assume that at the point when expenditure on food is adequate to meet essential nutritional requirements, the non-food component of expenditure is adequate to meet non-food needs. This is unlikely to be true. Besides, basic needs of many kinds are not met out of private expenditure but accessed as a result of public provision. Hence, it could happen that nations and regions characterised by a high degree of consumption poverty are also characterised by a poverty of basic needs and reflect poor human development outcomes.
 
The figures in Table 4, which captures trends in the composite human development index point to the fact that progress on the human development front during the 1990s amounted to less than 10 per cent in the case of 11 out of 19 countries. Thus while progress cannot be denied with substantial advance in some countries like Lao PDR, Cambodia, Bangladesh and India, that progress was uneven and below what was warranted by the massive scale of deprivation in the developing countries of the Asian region.
Table 4 >>

Determinants of Poverty
Answering the question, "Why was there not more progress against poverty?", Chen and Ravallion (2000) argue: "In the aggregate, and for some large regions, all our measures suggest that the 1990s did not see much progress against consumption poverty in the developing world. Yet this was a period of aggregate economic growth; the overall rate of growth in real per capita private consumption for the low- and middle-income countries over 1990-97 was 2.6% per year (World Bank, 2000a). The elasticity of the aggregate ($1/day) poverty gap in 1987 was –2.3. Even assuming no growth from 1987 to 1990, an annual rate of growth in mean consumption of 2.6% over 1990-97 alone would have virtually halved the aggregate poverty gap, as long as overall inequality did not worsen.
 
What went wrong? Rising inequality was one factor… the world distribution of consumption in 1985 was such that it would not take much of an increase in overall inequality to wipe out the benefits to the world's poor of modest growth in consumption per capita. The simulations in Ravallion et al. (1991) indicated that about a four percent increase in the world's Gini index, spread over 15 years from 1985, would be sufficient to wipe out the gains to the poor from a sustained one percent per annum rate of growth in consumption per capita. There is now evidence of quite sharply rising inter-personal income inequality in the world during this period; Milanovic (1999) estimates that the world Gini index increased by 5% between 1988 and 1993 (from 0.63 to 0.66). This could easily wipe out the gains to the world's poor from global economic growth.
 
Why was world inequality rising? Very few individual countries have experienced a trend increase in inequality over the longer term (a few decades, say) (Bruno et al., 1998). Over shorter periods (one to five years) one finds rising inequality in about half the developing countries, though this is uncorrelated with growth rates in average household consumption per capita. The more important factor in rising global inequality has been rising inequality between countries. This accounts for three-quarters of the increase in the world Gini index from 1988 to 1993. The unconditional growth divergence we have seen in the 1980s and 1990s — whereby growth rates have tended to be lower in poorer countries — appears to be a far more important reason for the low rate of aggregate poverty reduction than rising inequality within poor economies. Nonetheless, even when it is not rising, inequality within countries is an important constraint on prospects for pro-poor growth. There is evidence that the same rate of growth can have very different impacts on absolute consumption poverty."
 
The argument that it is growing inequality between countries rather than within countries that accounts for slow progress in the war against poverty in the Asia-Pacific region, is however, difficult to sustain. This is because the two countries that have the largest population and the largest number of the poor, namely China and India, were also countries which registered high or creditable rates of growth by international standards during the 1990s. Thus both globally and in the Asia-Pacific region in the aggregate, the burden of the explanation for the low overall rate of poverty reduction in the 1990s must fall on either persistent or rising inequality or on factors that neutralised whatever positive effect that growth in these countries had on poverty reduction.

Even the World Bank on its web page focussed on inequality
 
http://www.worldbank.org/wbp/data/trends/inequal.htm
 
admits this. It argues: "Countries with high levels of initial inequality have reduced poverty less for given rates of growth than countries with low initial inequality, and if growth is accompanied by increasing inequality, its impact on poverty will be reduced. However, our understanding of long-term trends in inequality is limited, partly because of weaknesses in the data. Trends in inequality have been extremely diverse. For example, Malaysia saw declines in inequality (as measured by the Gini coefficient) during the 1980s, but this trend was reversed in the 1990s. Korea and Indonesia experienced rapid growth during the 1980s with little change in inequality, while China and Russia experienced large increases in inequality over the same period. The available data show no stable relationship between growth and inequality. On average, income inequality within countries has neither decreased not increased over the last 30 years. However, since within-country inequality has increased in some populous countries, overall more people have been affected by increases in inequality than by decreases."