In Africa, the number of people living in poverty would increase under all scenarios. If the lack of progress observed over the last decade with respect to other dimensions of poverty life expectancy, school enrollment, and child mortality continues, as may well be the case if the AIDS epidemic is not stemmed, then the gap between the region and the rest of the world could widen significantly. This would be a grim outlook, not just for Africa but for the whole world, and efforts are needed in the region and elsewhere to break with the recent pattern of conflict and crisis, and to deal with the AIDS epidemic. Thus, the global war on poverty is likely to be with us well into the twenty-first century. In closing, it is important to note that these projections have some serious limitations.
Major questions remain as to the trends for India.
In addition, our understanding of trends in inequality and the divergence between national accounts and household based measures of private consumption is limited. Research to address some of these limitations, including further analysis of the data for India, is underway.