The natural disasters, food price spikes, global economic crisis, and civil unrest of the past decade might seem to cast a shadow on the prospects for the world’s poor.

Not so, if you look at the numbers, says The Economist.

New data released by the World Bank shows that between 2005 and 2008, poverty fell in every region of the world. Check out The Economist’s handy chart to see how:

Source: The Economist

Much of the progress has been in Africa, where poverty fell over a three-year period for the first time since 1981. It’s also the first time that more than half of Africans have lived above the poverty line.

The new numbers from 2008 are the most recent ones available for poverty, but we can look at the World Bank’s GDP per capita statistics to try to understand what the more recent past has looked like for the world. These stats show that GDP per capita actually fell in 2009, perhaps helping to flesh out the incomplete story told by the poverty statistics. Latin America and Central Asia were hit the hardest by the GDP dip.

The World Bank's poverty researchers don't think it’s all good news, either. Their more in-depth report cautions against excessive optimism regarding the new figures. Far less progress has been made with respect to the higher, $2-a-day measure of poverty, and even those who have moved above the poverty line are still very poor by developed-world standards.

Still, we’re making progress. The 2005-2008 numbers mean that one of the Millennium Development Goals - cutting poverty to half of its global level in 1990 - has been achieved years before its 2015 deadline. Combine this with Hans Rosling’s insights on overall advances in global health and poverty reduction over the past 200 years, and the world’s future starts to look a bit brighter.

It’s easy to get lost in a daily barrage of bad news. But in the global quest to end poverty, it looks like slow and steady wins the race.