THE WORK OF A GENERATION ... DESTROYED?

Millions had risen out of poverty. Coronavirus is pulling them back.

The World Bank says that for the first time since 1998, global poverty rates will rise. By the end of the year, 8 percent of the world’s population — half a billion people — could be pushed into destitution, largely because of the wave of unemployment brought by virus lockdowns, the United Nations estimates.

While everyone will suffer, the developing world will be hardest hit. The World Bank estimates that sub-Saharan Africa will see its first recession in 25 years, with nearly half of all jobs lost across the continent. South Asia will likely experience its worst economic performance in 40 years.

Most at risk are people working in the informal sector, which employs 2 billion people who have no access to benefits like unemployment assistance or health care. In Bangladesh, 1 million garment workers like Khatun — 7% of the country’s workforce, and many of them informally employed — lost their jobs because of the lockdown.

That is correct. Since 1998. Quarter century.  Developing world.  That's in addition to the two or three United Stateses worth of emerging middle classes in Latin America, parts of Asia, and the former Warsaw Pact countries.  The subjects of the mandarinate in Pekin are probably hardest hit.

In 1990, 36% of the world’s population, or 1.9 billion people, lived on less than $1.90 a day. By 2016, that number had dropped to 734 million people, or 10% of the world’s population, largely because of progress in South Asia and China.

Some of the biggest gains were made in India, where 210 million people were lifted out of poverty from 2006 to 2016, according to the United Nations. Since 2000, Bangladesh lifted 33 million people — 10% of its population — out of poverty while funding programs that provided education to girls, increased life expectancy and improved literacy. Famines that once plagued South Asia are now vanishingly rare, the population less susceptible to disease and starvation.

But that progress may be reversed, experts worry, and funding for anti-poverty programs may be cut as governments struggle with stagnant growth rates or economic contractions as the world heads for a recession.

In the United States, governors struggle over reopening packing houses and taverns, or whether to allow department stores to reopen while people grocery shopping at a Target or Wal Mart have the opportunities to browse for clothes.

In Bangladesh this week, the toll on the garment industry became so bleak that several hundred factories decided to reopen — a move almost certain to worsen the country’s coronavirus caseload.

The owner of the garment factory where [seamstress Shahida] Khatun worked, however, has told employees that even after the pandemic, he may no longer have work for them. The demand for clothing in Western countries will drop, he told Khatun and her colleagues, as people have less to spend.

Bet on emergence. I wonder how many people shopping for spiffy new work clothes once this Zooming gives way to something resembling traditional meetings will look closely at the label, and Bangladesh ain't China.