A regional body has proposed the creation of an online platform
to be used for supervision and analysis of poverty alleviation
measures among East Asian nations.
The proposal was touted at the East Asian Poverty Analysis and
Data Initiative (PADI) Consultative Meeting and Regional Workshop
on poverty monitoring and evaluation taking place from Thursday in
Nanchang, capital of Jiangxi Province.
The idea stemmed from Shahid Khandker, chief economist with
World Bank, who said an online mechanism would enable easy
information gathering and statistical analysis for PADI
members.
Thanks to data garnered from this platform, East Asian experts
and officials will better be able to propose effective
collaborating efforts to tackle poverty eradication, through better
understanding grassroots causes of poverty.
At the moment, woeful poverty monitoring data has often revealed
itself to be incomplete or unreliable while reliable statistics are
almost wholly absent, said Khandker. Compounded with a lack of
analytical frameworks, the need for a joint online platform is
urgent.
PADI was first founded in May 2000 at the call of the World Bank
Institute grouping China, Thailand, Vietnam, the Laos, the
Philippines, Cambodia, Indonesia, Malaysia and Mongolia.
International Poverty Reduction Center in China chief Zhang Lei
added his views that more personnel training on poverty analysis
and data gathering would also be beneficial.
Current World Bank standards label as poor anyone living on
under US$1 a day. By the financial body's statistics, around 552
million of the world's 1.1 billion poor live in East Asia.
The World Bank standard for poverty has it that anyone who lives
on less than daily should be classified as poor.
(Xinhua News Agency May 11, 2007)