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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 on a dollar a day.
Asia is also lagging in meeting the goal of promoting gender equality and empowerment, the report found, noting that large numbers of women are still shut out of jobs and receive poor health care.
In southern Asia, the participation of women in paid, non-agricultural employment rose from 13 per cent to 18 per cent between 1990 and 2005 -- still the lowest percentage of women working for wages, aside from farm labour, among all the regions of the world.
On health issues, the report noted, Southern Asia and sub-Saharan Africa share the distinction of having the highest number of maternal deaths and the lowest proportion of skilled health attendants at birth.
Only slightly more than one-third of women in Southern Asia receive attention from health-care personnel when giving birth, the report found.
In politics and government, the report found the gains for women were modest. In Southern Asia, the share of women serving in parliaments went from six per cent in 1990 to 13 per cent in 2007.
South-Eastern Asia saw a 10 per cent share rise in the same period, to 17 per cent. And in Eastern Asia, women's representation actually dropped one percentage point, to 19 per cent.
The UN report, titled the Millennium Development Goals Report 2007, is an annual statistical survey of global and regional progress toward the Goals that is produced at the request of the General Assembly.
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