China plays key role in world's anti-poverty fight

In the 30 years before the COVID-19 pandemic, global poverty significantly declined, Jeffrey Sachs said in a video speech aired Wednesday as part of the latest Vision China event. The global poverty rate was reduced from around 30 percent in 1990 to about 10 percent in 2015, said Sachs, who is director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University.

"China played a huge role in that because China was overwhelmingly poor, and then it had basically ... by 2015 largely eliminated poverty, and now, has eliminated extreme poverty as of this year," he said.