Asia s poverty due to lack of decent jobs

Policymakers in developing Asia need to provide decent jobs, liveable cities and disaster prevention programmes if they want to end poverty by 2030, according to a new report. The report, issued Friday by the Asian Development Bank (ADB), the UN Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific and the UN Development Programme, said although most Asia-Pacific economies succeeded in reducing poverty levels, about 1.64 billion people still live on less than two dollars a day, Xinhua reported.

There is also the problem of rising inequality, indicating that the benefits of recent economic gains were not distributed evenly. Lack of decent and productive jobs kept most people in the region poor, the report said. "Economic growth is not generating sufficient, decent and productive employment. This is due to the nature of growth and the pattern of structural change in many countries in which workers move from agriculture into low-productivity services," the report added.

The Asia-Pacific region also remains off-track in meeting its Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) on hunger, health, and sanitation. The report said the region remains home to two-thirds of the world's poor and more than 60 percent of its hungry people. The report proposes 12 specific goals that policymakers in the region could implement in order to end poverty and raise the quality of life by 2030.