How many people is the COVID-19 pandemic pushing into poverty? A long-term forecast to 2050 with alternative scenarios

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has changed the course of human development. In this manuscript we analyze the long-term effect of COVID-19 on poverty at the country-level across various income thresholds to 2050. We do this by introducing eight quantitative scenarios that model the future of Sustainable Development Goal 1 (SDG1) achievement using alternative assumptions about COVID-19 effects on both economic growth and inequality in the International Futures model. Relative to a scenario without the pandemic (the No COVID scenario), the COVID Base scenario increases global extreme poverty by 73.9 million in 2020 (the range across all scenarios: 43.5 to 155.0 million), 63.6 million in 2030 (range: 9.8 to 167.2 million) and 57.1 million in 2050 (range: 3.1 to 163.0 million). The COVID Base results in seven more countries not meeting the SDG1 target by 2030 that would have achieved the target in a No COVID scenario. The most pessimistic scenario results in 17 more countries not achieving SDG1 compared with a No COVID scenario. The greatest pandemic driven increases in poverty occur in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa.

Policy strategies to achieve zero hunger by 2040 at the country-level

“…IFs projects long-term development patterns as an interconnected system with a focus on representing these systems in isolation and representing the interactions between these systems, by endogenizing the majority of variables. The full model as well as the human [47][48][49][50] , socio-economic 42,[51][52][53][54] and physical 55,56 sub-models have been published and applied to issues of food security 38 , poverty 57 and broad SDG achievement 45,58 . The IFs model is fully open-source and can be run by anyone with access to a windows computer (https://korbel.du.edu/pardee/international-futures-platform/download-ifs) and all underlying documentation is publicly available (https://pardeewiki.du.edu/index.php?title=International_Futures_(IFs)).…”

“…The number or population of undernourished (NoU) is a function of the prevalence of undernourishment (PoU) and the total population. The distribution of undernourishment is assumed to follow a log-normal distribution, similar to extreme poverty in IFs 57 and to most global long-term food security forecasts up to today 2 . A main advantage of this approach is that the total PoU can be calculated from the CLPC (mean), and the CV(variance).…”

Healthcare Challenges due to Global Conflict Escalation Amid the Pandemic, Climate, and Economic Dilemmas

“…Already, the cost of illiteracy to the global economy has exceeded $1 trillion, and UNESCO estimates that close to 900 million learners have been affected by the closure of educational institutions, and 100 million children would fall below the minimum reading proficiency level (Nicola et al, 2020) (Figure 4). Globally, 3.3 billion people, which constitutes 81% of the world's workforce, were affected by the lockdown, and the world incurred a loss of 9% of global working hours, followed by 4.4% of the global GDP in lost labor incomes (Moyer et al, 2022). Economically and socially disadvantaged populations were twice as likely to present with COVID-19 symptoms to the emergency department and were more likely to require re-hospitalization within 30 days of discharge (Tuczyńska et al, 2022).…”

Multidecadal dynamics project slow 21st-century economic growth and income convergence

“…The mortality model relies upon both distal and proximate drivers of 21 causes of mortality by age and sex 69,70 . Poverty in IFs rely upon a) economic production/consumption models; b) resource distribution; and c) demographic dynamics [71][72][73] . Economic production is driven by a dynamic-recursive computable general equilibrium model with Cobb-Douglas production function and Solow residual (Section 6.1 in ref.…”