Developing countries appear to have already met a United Nations goal to halve extreme poverty in the world’s poorest countries by 2015, thanks mainly to China’s economic boom, the World Bank said on Wednesday.The Washington-based development lender said preliminary data showed developing countries as a group reached the goal - the first of eight U.N. Millennium Development Goals - in 2010.The goals are a set of targets adopted by world leaders at the United Nations in 2000 to fight poverty, hunger and disease in poor countries.The progress is mainly due to China’s rapid economic rise, which has helped to lift many of its people out of poverty. Excluding China, however, the number of people in the developing world living in extreme poverty was about the same in 2008 as in 1981 at around 1.1 billion, the World Bank said.“We are now confident that the developing world as a whole has reached the first of the Millennium Goals and reached that goal in 2010 despite the crisis,” said Martin Ravallion, director of the World Bank’s research group and lead author of the report.A breakdown by region, however, shows that just Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and East Asia and the Pacific - which includes India and China - achieved the poverty goal. Africa and Latin America are not there yet, the World Bank said.
