But this trend, he argues, was already in place when the U.N.'s Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), which includes a 50 percent reduction in extreme poverty and hunger by 2015, were approved in the year 2000.

"What we are saying is that we do not have the necessary data to state what is happening to poverty in China since 2000," Bissio told IPS. "Yes, there is fast economic growth happening in China, but also a lot of income concentration."

In terms of the access to basic health and education services, though, all evidence points out that this was achieved in China before economic growth started in the eighties, and in fact could even have been one of the reasons for economic growth, not the other way around, he added.

The World Bank's new poverty estimates, released last month, reveal that 1.4 billion people in the developing world (one in four) were living on less than 1.25 dollars per day in 2005, down from 1.9 billion (one in two) in 1981. The current total world population is about 6.0 billion.

"The new numbers show that poverty has been more widespread across the developing world over the past 25 years than previously estimated, but also that there has been strong, if regionally uneven progress, toward reducing overall poverty," the Bank said. According to the United Nations, which concurs with the World Bank, "most of the decline occurred in Eastern Asia, particularly China".

"Other regions have seen much smaller decreases in the poverty rate, and only modest falls in the number of poor," says a new U.N. report on MDGs released in early September.

In sub-Saharan Africa and the Commonwealth of Independent States, the U.N. study said, the number of poor increased between 1990 and 2005.

In a new study released Monday, to mark the upcoming U.N. high level meeting on MDGs Sep. 25, Social Watch said that contrary to repeated mainstream claims that global poverty is diminishing fast, the coverage of the basic needs required to escape poverty is slowing down and even regressing in many places.

The 2008 Basic Capabilities Index (BCI) released by Social Watch says the majority of the planet's population lives in countries with dormant social indicators or which are progressing too slow to reach an acceptable standard of life in the next decade, or for which there is no reliable information.

Progress in basic social indicators slowed down last year all over the world and at the present rate, the index stresses, the internationally agreed poverty reduction goals will not be met by 2015, unless substantial changes occur, it adds.

In Sub-Saharan Africa, for instance, progress in social indicators is extremely slow and, at the current rate, would only reach an acceptable BCI score in the 23rd century, the study notes.

Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon points out that the recent fuel, food and climate crises are already threatening to undermine the MDGs.

"The largely benign development environment that has prevailed since the early years of this decade, and that has contributed to the successes to date, is now threatened," he said last month.

"The economic slowdown will diminish the incomes of the poor; the food crisis will raise the number of hungry people in the world and push millions more into poverty; climate change will have a disproportionate impact on the poor," the secretary-general warned.

Ban said he expects a number of new initiatives to address health, poverty, food and climate change issues, at the upcoming high-level meeting of world leaders.

Asked if most recent estimates on reduced poverty in China are flawed, Bissio told IPS: "The actual trend of poverty in China is difficult to determine."

"We now have, as a result of a credible global survey, the income poverty figures for 2005, but all previous values are mere estimates."

On top of that, in the transition to a market economy, income may grow without people's lives actually changing, he argued.

In the commune system, where millions of peasants were self-sufficient, they now receive a salary, but they also have to pay for the food they used to get free, Bissio said: "In terms of actual food intake nothing changes, but in terms of the formal economy, total income registered increases both with the money they receive and what they pay."

Social Watch is not saying that poverty is not decreasing in China, he pointed out. "It is just saying that the situation is complex and there are not enough data to analyse it."

The World Bank erred by 40 percent in its previous estimates of the size of the economies of China and India, judging them to be much bigger than what the new estimates show, he noted.

Shaida Badiee, director of the Bank's Development Data Group, pointed out that "data are never perfect, though they are getting better over time."

"The World Bank works constantly with partners in developing countries to improve data quality and access to data," she added.