Serious inequality in the region means that poverty is substantially above official predictions. Most of the world's poor live in Asia, where rural and urban poverty have decreased. The proportion of poor people is highest in sub-Saharan Africa. Prosperity is increasingly threatened by growing income inequality and potential civil strife. In countries of the former Soviet Union, the number of poor has more than tripled.
Parents insure against high death rates with even higher birth rates.
This situation is being transformed by the impact on rural poverty of falling child mortality, followed 10-25 years later by falling fertility. Fertility has been declining, since the 1980s at least, throughout most of the developing world, including Africa. Later than others, the rural and the poor have come to benefit from the decline in child mortality and other incentives to later marriage and lower marital fertility. Rural women in developing countries tend to have between one and three more children than urban women. For the rural poor, the gap is bigger.