China 'sets example' for tackling poverty

China's success in reducing poverty has driven global alleviations efforts, and could set an example for the rest of the world, according to a senior official at the World Bank.

"Much of the success in poverty reduction globally has actually been driven by China's incredible success in reducing poverty," said Ana Revenga, senior director of poverty and equity global practice at the bank, during a teleconference to promote its inaugural report called Poverty and Shared Prosperity 2016.

The report, which was released on Sunday, showed that nearly 800 million people lived on less than $1.90 a day in 2013. That's about 100 million fewer people classified as "extremely poor" than in 2012, and from 1990 to 2013, the number of extremely poor people fell from 35 percent of the global population to less than 11 percent.

The progress on extreme poverty has been mainly driven by East Asia and Pacific countries, especially China, Indonesia and India, the report said.

Despite the good news, "there is no room for complacency", said Francisco Ferreira, senior adviser to the bank's Development Research Group.

The report showed that half of the world's poorest people now live in sub-Saharan Africa, while a further one-third live in South Asia.

"The pockets of poverty that remain will become increasingly harder to reach and address," Ferreira said.

The report forecast that the world would be unable to achieve the goal of ending extreme poverty by 2030, even under optimistic scenarios for growth and with no change to levels of inequality. The World Bank set a target to reduce the global poverty head count ratio to 3 percent by 2030 from 12.4 percent in 2012.

China has provided a lesson to the rest of the world on how to tackle extreme poverty in a quick way, Revenga said. "If any country can show the world how to do that last mile (to end extreme poverty), it is probably China."