Senior fellow Charles Kenny was quoted in a UPI piece on the new World Bank poverty data.
The World Bank in Washington said Tuesday extreme poverty is in decline around the world, despite the nearly global economic recession.
Data shows the U.N. Millennium Development Goals had reached a critical target of reducing extreme poverty by 50 percent five years ahead of time, The New York Times reported.
Extreme poverty is defined as someone living on less than $1.25 per day.
The World Bank had forecast the recession would prove to be a serious setback for goals of reducing poverty. However, it turns out, poverty has declined despite the recession.
A major part of the story is China, where nearly 700 million people were lifted out of poverty between 1981 and 2008.
But poverty also declined in the sub-Sahara region of Africa, a place where poverty was believed to be stubbornly intractable.
"People used to worry: 'Is Africa going to be poor forever?'" said Charles Kenny, a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development. "Well, it doesn't really look like it, does it?"
Between 2002 and 2008, extreme poverty in the Middle East and North Africa dropped from 4.2 percent to 2.7 percent, data shows.
In the sub-Sahara region, extreme poverty declined from 55.7 percent to 47.5 percent over the same period.
Besides China's torrid economic growth in the past 20 years, developing countries, generally a source of the industrial world's raw materials, have been rewarded with higher commodity prices in recent years.
"This is very good news. There has been broad-based progress in fighting poverty, and accelerating progress. There's a lot to be happy about," said Jeffrey Sachs, director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University and the former director of the Millennium Development Goals project.