The UN, the World Bank, the IMF and the OECD jointly issued their interim report which makes bleak reading. In 1998, 1.2 billion people were in dire poverty throughout the world. This is the same number, though a slightly smaller proportion of the world's population, as were poor in 1990. The poor still account for nearly half of all sub-Saharan Africans, as they did a decade ago, and for more than 550m people in South Asia, slightly down, as a proportion of population from 1990.