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Aug 9, 2018 · Where do the world’s poorest people live today? Globally, extreme poverty is at a historic low. The latest estimates show that 10 percent of the world or 736 million people lived below $1.90/day in 2015. But where exactly are these poor people located?
The poorest people today live in countries that have achieved no economic growth. This stagnation of the world’s poorest economies is one of the largest problems of our time. Unless this changes, hundreds of millions of people will continue to live in extreme poverty.
- Where Is This Data Sourced from?
- About The Comparability of Household Surveys
- Income vs Expenditure Surveys
- Other Comparability Issues
- Global and Regional Poverty Estimates
- Absolute vs Relative Poverty Lines
This data explorer is collated and adapted from the World Bank’s Poverty and Inequality Platform(PIP). The World Bank’s PIP data is a large collection of household surveys where steps have been taken by the World Bank to harmonize definitions and methods across countries and over time.
There is no global survey of incomes. To understand how incomes across the world compare, researchers need to rely on available national surveys. Such surveys are partly designed with cross-country comparability in mind, but because the surveys reflect the circumstances and priorities of individual countries at the time of the survey, there are som...
One important issue is that the survey data included within the PIPdatabase tends to measure people’s income in high-income countries, and people’s consumption expenditure in poorer countries. The two concepts are closely related: the income of a household equals their consumption plus any saving, or minus any borrowing or spending out of savings. ...
There are a number of other ways in which comparability across surveys can be limited. The PIP Methodology Handbookprovides a good summary of the comparability and data quality issues affecting this data and how it tries to address them. In collating this survey data the World Bank takes a range of steps to harmonize it where possible, but comparab...
Along with data for individual countries, the World Bank also provides global and regional poverty estimates which aggregate over the available country data. Surveys are not conducted annually in every country however – coverage is generally poorer the further back in time you look, and remains particularly patchy within Sub-Saharan Africa. You can...
This dataset provides poverty estimates for a range of absolute and relative poverty lines. An absolute poverty line represents a fixed standard of living; a threshold that is held constant across time. Within the World Bank’s poverty data, absolute poverty lines also aim to represent a standard of living that is fixed across countries (by converti...
Mar 5, 2021 · The latest global data tells us that 85% of the world population live on less than $30 per day. These are 6.5 billion people. Relying on a higher poverty line of $45 per day you find that 92% live in poverty, and using a lower poverty line of $20 per day you find that 78% live in poverty.
May 2, 2022 · The new extreme poverty line of $2.15 per person per day, which replaces the $1.90 poverty line, is based on 2017 PPPs. Here you find more information about this change and what it means for measuring global poverty.
Dec 2, 2021 · About 700 million people, mostly in sub-Saharan Africa, continue to live in utter destitution on less than $1.90 a day. The engine of economic growth has yet to rescue them.
Oct 17, 2022 · The majority of multidimensionally poor people (83%) live in Sub-Saharan Africa (nearly 579 million) and South Asia (385 million). Two-thirds of poor people live in middle-income countries, and 83% in rural areas. And despite its impressive pre-pandemic progress, India was still home to 229 million poor people.
