A new report released in Washington DC by the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) on Wednesday challenged leaders to do much more to end extreme poverty in another 16 years. The Global Monitoring Report 2014/2015, released by the World Bank, lamented the gap in living standards between those in the bottom 40 and the top 60 per cent of the population around the world, noting the need to promote shared prosperity, measured as income growth of the bottom 40 per cent. Forecasts in the report showed that poverty in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia will remain stubbornly high, where an estimated 377 million of the world's 412 million poor will likely reside by 2030. In 2011, the two regions were home to 814 million of the world's one billion poor. In terms of living standards, the report said the bottom 40 per cent in the developing world are much worse off when it comes to access to education, health, and sanitation. For example, children in the poorest households, the report continued, are almost twice as likely to be malnourished than those in the top 60 percent. In the high-income world, which the report analyses for the first time, the main concern is income inequality, which has reached levels unprecedented since World War II. The analysis on high-income countries was contributed by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). The OECD chapter finds that, among high-income countries, the average income of the richest 10 per cent of the population is now about 9.5 times that of the poorest 10 per cent, as opposed to seven times 25 years ago. The chapter also analyses the extent to which wealthier countries are amending their tax and transfer systems to improve their redistributive impact. "The world has made great progress in the last quarter-century in reducing extreme poverty - it was cut by a stunning two-thirds - and now we have the opportunity to end poverty in less than a generation," said World Bank Group President Jim Yong Kim. "But we will not finish the job unless we find ways to reduce inequality, which stubbornly persists all over the world. "This vision of a more equal world means we must find ways to spread wealth to the billions who have almost nothing," he added. The report noted that much success has been achieved in reducing extreme poverty - those living on less than a $1.25 a day. However, the number of poor remains unacceptably high, at just over one billion people (14 per cent of the world population) in 2011, compared with 1.2 billion (19 per cent of the world population) in 2008. According to Kaushik Basu, Senior Vice President and Chief Economist of the World Bank Group, "If it is shocking to have a poverty line as low as $1.25 per day, it is even more shocking that 1/7th of the world's population lives below this line. "The levels of inequality and poverty that prevail in the world today are totally unacceptable. "This year's Global Monitoring Report, which brings together in one volume a statistical picture of where the world stands in terms of these goals, is essential fodder for anyone wishing to take on these major challenges of our time," he said. For Sean Nolan, IMF Deputy Director, Strategy, Policy, and Review Department, "despite the weakness in the global economy in 2014, we still project growth for low-income developing economies to be over 6 per cent over the medium term, which bodes well for the world's poor. "We are generally optimistic about the growth prospects of the three regions with almost 95 per cent of world's poor in 2011 - East Asia, South Asia, and sub-Saharan Africa - but need to keep in mind that there are many individual countries within these regions where growth prospects are less benign."