Staff Reporter :
Bangladesh will have 16.4 million new poor in 2020 as the income of working class in urban and rural areas have fallen sharply due to the lockdown to stop the spread of Covid-19 pandemic.
A research paper titled “Poverty in the time of Corona: Short-term Effects of Economic Slowdown and Policy Responses through Social Protection” conducted by Binayak Sen, research director of Bangladesh Institute Development Studies (BIDS) estimated the figure on Wednesday.
The report was unveiled at a virtual conversation titled “BIDS Critical Conversations 2020 In the Shadow of Covid-19 – Coping, Adjustments, and Responses” organized by BIDS.
Under a post-lockdown optimistic scenario, the country’s overall poverty to increase by 25.13%, where rural poverty will be 24.23%and urban poverty will be 27.52%.
“We ran several scenarios – representing successive severity of lockdown — under the “wealth plus labour status” approach. In a scenario where there is an 80% drop in income for labor class in urban areas and 10% drop in income for labor class in rural areas in the “hard lockdown” exercise, we would have 16.4 million new poor,” Binayak said in his presentation.
“If we consider a 25% higher poverty line, then an additional 16% to 20% of population would be in poverty in rural and urban areas. If we update our age-old poverty line accordingly, it will result in a much higher poverty where rural poverty would be 45%, and urban poverty would be 36%,” said, Research Director, BIDS.
To sum up, we have two kinds of vulnerability in poverty – one relates to the risk of slippages of the near-poor into poverty, and the other pertains to the risk of slippages of the moderate poor into extreme poverty, said the economist.
Both kinds of vulnerabilities need to be kept in view while designing programs and policies in times of crisis such as Covid-19 because they may demand different solutions and approaches, he added.
