BEIJING - The number of impoverished people in rural areas of ethnic minority-inhabited regions decreased by 5.59 million in 2013, China's State Ethnic Affairs Commission (SEAC) said on Monday.

The commission released a statement, saying there were 25.62 million people living in poverty in eight ethnic minority-inhabited provincial-level regions last year.

The regions are Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, Tibet Autonomous Region, Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region, Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, and provinces of Guizhou, Yunnan and Qinghai.

About 17.1 percent of people in rural areas of the eight regions live in poverty, 8.6 percentage points higher than the whole country, said the report.

Poor rural people in Guangxi, Guizhou and Yunnan account for almost 80 percent of the total in the eight regions, and about a quarter of the total number of poor people in the country's rural areas.