DUSHANBE, December 17, 2008, Asia-Plus  -- In 2007, 53 percent of the Tajik population lived below the international poverty line, Usmon Rahmonov, coordinator of the ADB’s project, Strengthening Results Management in Support of Poverty Reduction in Tajikistan, said in an interview with Asia-Plus.

Of them, 17 percent lived below the extreme poverty line, he said, noted that those figures were given in the report on implementation of the Poverty Reduction Strategy (PRS) in 2007.

Rahmonov noted that extreme poverty was defined as a family whose after-tax income is less than $1.00 per day.

He added that the report was prepared in 2007, “when inflation processes were not progressing as fast as today, and therefore, it cannot reflect the present poverty situation in the country.”  “Figures given in the 2007 report cannot reflect the present level of poverty in the country.  High inflation rates reported in 2008 have changed these figures upwards,” Rahmonov said.

We will recall that in a report released at a press conference in Dushanbe, Tajik Labor and Social Protection Minister Shukurjon Zuhurov revealed on January 22 2008 that more than half of the Tajik population lives below the international poverty line, which he defined as equal to $1.20 per day in 2007.

It is to be noted that The Economist on May 22 this year reported on the most recent work by Martin Ravallion and two colleagues, World Bank researchers who first drew the global poverty line at "a dollar a day" over a decade ago.  Starting again from scratch and based on new data, the team has erased the old and announced the new international poverty line at $1.25 a day.  According to The Economist, they gathered 75 national poverty lines, ranging from Senegal''s severe $0.63 a day to Uruguay''s more generous measure of just over $9.  From this collection, they picked the 15 lowest (Nepal, Tajikistan and 13 sub-Saharan countries) and split the difference between them.  The result is a new international poverty line of $1.25 a day.