This paper analyses recent poverty dynamics with a focus on Asian and Pacific economies and their demographic profiles. We decompose poverty changes in the region into contributions from economic growth and changing inequality and investigate how both channels relate to demographic and socio-economic factors. Our results show that recent poverty reduction in Asia and the Pacific was predominantly driven by strong economic growth performances. Reductions in income inequality also contributed to poverty reduction, but no more than a third (and substantially less in countries with a young demographic profile). Through a counterfactual poverty decomposition approach, we show that poverty reduction in the region was stronger than countries’ initial macroeconomic conditions would have suggested. In that sense, countries and territories in the Asia-Pacific region “overperformed” in poverty reduction, mostly due to higher growth than one could have expected. This pattern was particularly strong in countries that we classify as “aged” or “ageing.” Our paper shows that an increasing old-age population share can be positively associated with economic growth and poverty reduction. This is plausible if experience effects of an ageing workforce outweigh age-related declines in labour-force participation. We further find no evidence for a trade-off between inequality reduction and economic growth, unless one of these two channels of poverty reduction is pushed very far, and we find that Asian and Pacific countries with the lowest social protection coverage were those with less progress in poverty reduction.