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The World Bank Group is this month set to review the performance of emerging and developing economies such as Zambia’s since 2000 and assess their prospects.
This would come about as 2025 marked the end of the first quarter of the 21st century.
The next Global Economic Prospects report, to be published on January 14, 2025, would feature two analytical chapters that offer a first-quarter report card.
The first covers the performance of the 26 low-income economies; the second provides insights on middle-income emerging and developing economies.
This is according to Ayhan Kose, World Bank Group Deputy Chief Economist and Director of the Prospects Group during a 2024-year review on Monday.
“In the January 2025 edition of the Global Economic Prospects Report, we will have two analytical chapters exactly doing that. One chapter is about low-income countries, which we are releasing in advance, and the other one is on middle-income, emerging, and developing economies.
“There are 26 low-income countries today, down from 63 at the turn of the century. Yet when we look forward, even based on the growth rates we saw in the 2010s, so before the most recent damage done by the pandemic and other shocks, only six of these 26 low-income countries seem on course to graduate to middle-income status by 2050,” Kose said.
He explained that the first of these chapters, Falling Graduation Prospects: Low-Income Countries (LICs) in the 21st Century, was being released in advance.
LICs are home to 40 percent of the world’s extreme poor, with Kose explaining that their working-age populations were expanding more rapidly than elsewhere, which could accelerate growth and reduce poverty, but only if these people are productively employed.
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