Why a richer developing world is in everyone’s interest
In 1990, about 2.3 billion people lived in extreme poverty. By 2025 that figure had fallen to roughly 830 million (World Bank, 2025), even as the world added more than two and a half billion people along the way (UN World Population Prospects, 2024). Almost all of that progress happened in one place: countries that were poor and became less poor.
The momentum hasn’t stopped. Emerging and developing economies have been growing at roughly twice the rate of the rich ones for years (IMF World Economic Outlook, 2025), and India is now the world’s fourth-largest economy (IMF, 2025).
The story of the last generation isn’t that poor countries stayed poor. Many of them started catching up.
The question now is not whether emerging economies can grow. It is whether they and the developed world can build the next stage together, on purpose, instead of repeating an older and more extractive arrangement.
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