A global count of the extreme poor in 2012: data issues, methodology and initial results

Abstract

The 2014 release of a new set of purchasing power parity (PPP) conversion factors (PPPs) for 2011 has prompted a revision of the World Bank's international poverty line. In revising the line, we have sought to minimize changes to the real purchasing power of the earlier $1.25 line (in 2005 PPPs), so as to preserve the integrity of the goalposts for international targets such as the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the World Bank's twin goals -which were set with respect to that line. In particular, the new line was obtained by inflating the same fifteen national poverty lines -originally used by Ravallion et al. In combination with other changes described in the paper, this revision leads to relatively small changes in global poverty incidence for 2011: from 14.5 % using the old method to 14.1 % using the new method. In 2012, the new reference year for the global count, we find 12.7 % of the world's population, or 897 million people, are living in extreme poverty. There are changes in the regional composition of poverty, but they are also relatively small. This paper documents methodological decisions taken in the process of updating both the poverty line and the consumption and income distributions at the country level, including issues of inter-temporal and spatial price adjustments. It also describes various caveats and limitations of the approach taken. Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article

The Global Consumption and Income Project (GCIP): An Overview

“…Those concerned with estimating global inequality or poverty almost universally recognize this concern but do not generally correct for it 19 (Ferreira et al (2015); Lakner and Milanovic (2013)). Comparing measures of inequality or poverty across countries can therefore be highly misleading.…”

“…The GCIP has been constructed to differ in key respects. The GCIP has wider area and time coverage (due to inclusion of surveys from other sources, largely secondary but sometimes primary), it incorporates a standardized welfare concept (consumption or income, with one estimated from the other where necessary) making within and cross-country comparisons more meaningful, it allows for the 10 See Ferreira et al (2015) for details on the pooling method. There are questions however as to whether such pooling is sensible (Reddy and Lahoti (2015)) which is why we endeavor to separate consumption and income estimates.…”

Global inequality and global poverty since the Cold War: how robust is the optimistic narrative?

“…It is only when poverty lines increase to around $5 that this sensitivity to measurement and assumption differences starts to reduce significantly. (Ferreira et al, 2015;Jolliffe and Prydz, 2015). While the logic of this is open to contention, as in previous adjustments (see Lahoti and Reddy, 2015and the historic, Ravallion, 2002Pogge, 2002, 2005), the new line does have one underlying rationale in that it is the median of the national poverty lines in the world's low income countries (rather than merely the 15 countries that were used to estimate the earlier $1.25 line).…”

“…To ensure optimum coverage of the global population, where a country has no surveys, or the gaps between surveys are too great to allow reliable interpolation, the GrIP model 'fills' a country's missing distributions with the (not population-weighted) average distribution from all other countries in the same region and income group (in contrast, the World Bank poverty estimates are based on 'filling' with regional averages regardless of average income. See for details Ferreira et al, 2015).…”

Initial outcomes of a comprehensive care model for sickle cell disease among a tribal population in rural western India

“…16 The majority of the population is from tribal communities, largely subsistence farmers earning less than the international poverty line. 17 Local epidemiological data suggests that the prevalence of sickle cell trait in the population seeking care at SEWA Rural hospital is approximately 15% and sickle cell disease 2%.…”