What is the Poverty Rate in Southeast Asia?
Heavily populated, Southeast Asia is one of the poorest subregions in the world, containing approximately 55 million people living in destitution. 1 Based on a poverty rate of $5.50 per day, the average poverty ratio across the region was 40.26 percent in 2018, with the highest value in Laos and the lowest in Thailand. 2 To learn more about the poverty rate in Southeast Asia and the surrounding area, consider the following: According to The Borgen Project, “Despite widespread economic success, Asia remains the worst continent for global hunger and contains more than half of the world’s poorest people.” 3 In the Asia-Pacific region, 400 million people live in extreme poverty, earning $1.90 a day or less. “At the higher international poverty line of $3.20 a day, the number of poor rises to 1.2 billion, accounting for more than a quarter of the region’s total population,” says ESCAP, an intergovernmental platform in the area. 4 Asia contains 70 percent of the world’s malnourished childr...