WASHINGTON -- Global poverty has fallen to a record low.

The World Bank said Wednesday that 10 per cent of the world's population lived on less than $1.90 a day in 2015 -- the last year for which numbers were available -- down from 11.2 per cent in 2013. That means 735.9 million people lived below the poverty threshold in 2015, down by 68.3 million from 804.2 million two years earlier.

Still, the bank warned that the pace of poverty reduction has slowed, jeopardizing its goal of reducing the poverty rate to 3 per cent by 2030.

Poverty dropped everywhere but the Middle East and North Africa, where conflicts in Syria and Yemen ratcheted the poverty rate to 5 per cent in 2015 from 2.6 per cent in 2013, raising the number of impoverished to 18.6 million from 9.5 million.

The poverty rate fell to 41.1 per cent from 42.5 per cent in Sub-Saharan Africa, to 12.4 per cent from 16.2 per cent in South Asia, to 4.1 per cent from 4.6 per cent in Latin America and the Caribbean, to 2.3 per cent from 3.6 per cent in

East Asia and the Pacific and to 1.5 per cent from 1.6 per cent in Europe and Central Asia.