Dan Roberts
guardian.co.uk

Extreme global poverty could be eradicated by the end of the next decade under optimistic new targets unveiled by the World Bank that have divided development experts.

The bank's president, Jim Yong Kim, claimed signs of recovery in the global economy meant there was now an "opportunity to create a world free from the stain of poverty" by 2030.

"We are at an auspicious moment in history, when the successes of past decades and an increasingly favourable economic outlook combine to give developing countries a chance – for the first time ever – to end extreme poverty within a generation," he said in a speech in Washington.

The World Bank's upbeat projections, defining extreme poverty as the 1.3 billion people living on less than $1.25 per day, come as governments and international institutions prepare to set new targets to update the 15-year Millennium Development Goals set by the United Nations in 2000.

Faster-than-expected growth in China and some developing economies has helped the UN meet parts of its existing target for halving poverty ahead of time, but the approaching deadline for setting new priorities has sparked a fierce debate in the development community.

Critics accused the World Bank of being "very unambitious" and obsessed with economic growth rather tackling inequality after the leak of planning documents in March that were heavily focused on free market orthodoxy as the primary solution to global poverty.

The recent criticism appears to have to stung Kim into stressing a greater need for poorer people to take their share of economic growth too.

"We have to break the taboo of silence on this difficult but critically important issue," said Kim in his speech delivered to students at Washington's Georgetown University on Tuesday. "Even if rapid economic expansion in the developing world continues, this doesn't mean that everyone will automatically benefit from the development process. Assuming that growth is inclusive is both a moral imperative and a crucial condition for sustained economic development."

But those who monitor the activities of the World Bank said the new rhetoric was not matched by detailed policies to tackle inequality.

"Kim is obviously very good at using soaring rhetoric to motivate people to tackle poverty but he is still very unambitious in practice and too focused on economic growth as an end in itself," said Peter Chowla, a co-ordinator at the Bretton Woods Project, a campaign group set up to monitor the World Bank. "Talk of sharing the proceeds of growth is not the same as tackling inequality, which has soared in recent decades."

Chowla also noted that the many of the developing countries where growth has occurred, such as China and India, have been those that have been least enthusiastic in adopting World Bank prescriptions on deregulation and free trade. "In fact, a lot of the Bank's recent focus on funding big infrastructure projects actually hark back to the bad old World Bank of the 1980s," he added.

Other groups have argued that the whole process of setting new global goals for poverty reduction was inherently elitist and was failing to include poorer people in the process of setting priorities.

World Bank officials will meet the UN secretary general this weekend in Madrid to begin the process of agreeing replacements for the Millennium Development Goals, taking advice from a working group chaired by UK prime minister David Cameron.

Kim's optimistic speech in Washington was also tinged with caution about the outlook for the world economy.

"In high-income countries, headwinds from fiscal consolidation continue to drag on growth," he said, noting that GDP was expected to shrink in Europe this year.

And Kim, whose parents are from North Korea but who grew up in the US, said tackling poverty in conflict zones was likely to prove the toughest problem of all to solve.

The Bank's target of eliminating "extreme" poverty by 2030 does not include the poorest 3%, which it defines as being sporadic rather than structural poverty.