Busan (South Korea): Economic growth in China and India has dramatically reduced the number of people in Asia subsisting below the poverty level of $1 a day, but the total remains in the hundreds of millions, the International Labour Organisation said on Tuesday.
Since 1990, about 250 million people have risen above that benchmark, said the report, titled ''Labour and Social Trends in Asia and the Pacific 2006: Progress toward Decent Work.''
Still, over 600 million Asians live below that level, or ''more than two-thirds of the world's poor,'' the report said. ''If the poverty line is raised to $2 a day, Asia has about 1.9 billion poor people,'' or more than three-fourths of the world total, it said.
''The two main engines behind the rise of Asia are China and India'', the report said. ''They have emerged as global economic powerhouses, shifting the growth pole from the West to the East.''
The report comes as the UN agency covering work and workplace issues prepared to open a four-day meeting later on Tuesday in the South Korean port city of Busan.
The percentage of people living on $1 a day in South Asia, which includes India and Bangladesh, dropped to 28.4 per cent in 2003 from 40.9 per cent in 1990, the report said. In East Asia, which includes China, it fell to 14.9 per cent from 31.2 per cent.
The ILO meeting also plans to address an array of topics including migrant workers, labour market governance, youth and child employment and improving conditions and creating jobs.
''The Asian countries have done very well in terms of economic growth,'' Lin Lean Lim, ILO Deputy Regional Director, told reporters. ''But in terms of jobs, of new jobs for people, we haven't done so well.''
In China, for instance, where gross domestic product grew 59 per cent and productivity surged nearly 40 per cent between 2000 and 2004, growth in job creation managed about 5 per cent, the agency's report said.
And most Southeast Asian countries had higher joblessness in 2004 than in 1995, suggesting that the region is still suffering the effects of the 1997-98 financial crisis in the form of weak job creation, it said.
But the ILO report also cited progress in the area of child labour.
It said that the number of working children, defined as being between the ages of five to 14, in Asia fell to 122.3 million in 2004 from 127.3 million in 2000, citing improved access to education. Still, Asia has about two-thirds of the world's children who work.
In the worst cases, the report said that children in the region are subjected to ''slavery, trafficking into exploitative situations, debt bondage and other forms of forced labour, forced recruitment into armed conflict, prostitution, pornography and other illicit activities''.
Representatives from some 40 countries in the Asia-Pacific as well as workers' and employers' organisations are scheduled to attend the ILO gathering through Friday on how globalisation affects labour market and employment.
The meeting, normally held every four years, was originally scheduled for 2005 in Busan, but tension between South Korean labour organisations and the government forced organisers to postpone the meeting.
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