Person:
Jolliffe, Dean
Author Name Variants
Fields of Specialization
Food security,
Education economics,
Health economics,
Data collection methods,
Measuring Poverty
Degrees
ORCID
External Links
Departments
Development Economics Data Group, The World Bank
Externally Hosted Work
Contact Information
Last updated
August 29, 2023
Biography
Dean Jolliffe is a lead economist in the Development Data Group at the World Bank. He is a member of the Living Standards Measurement Study team and co-lead of the team that works on global poverty measurement (PovcalNet). Previously, he worked in the Research Group and the South Asia region of the World Bank. Prior to joining the World Bank, he was a research economist with the Economic Research Service of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, an assistant professor at Charles University Center for Economic Research and Graduate Education in Prague, an adjunct professor at Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies, an adjunct professor at Georgetown University Public Policy Institute, and a postdoctoral fellow at the International Food Policy Research Institute. Dean holds appointments as a research fellow with the Institute for the Study of Labor, as a co-opted council member of the International Association for Research in Income and Wealth, and as a fellow of the Global Labor Organization. He received his PhD in economics from Princeton University.
Publication Search Results
1 - 2 of 2
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Publication
Assessing the Impact of the 2017 PPPs on the International Poverty Line and Global Poverty
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2022-02-21)Purchasing power parity exchange rates (PPPs) are used to estimate the international poverty line (IPL) in a common currency and account for relative price differences across countries when measuring global poverty. This paper assesses the impact of the 2017 PPPs on the nominal value of the IPL and global poverty. The analysis indicates that updating the $1.90 IPL in 2011 PPP dollars to 2017 PPP dollars results in an IPL of approximately $2.15—a finding that is robust to various methods and assumptions. Based on an updated IPL of $2.15, the global extreme poverty rate in 2017 falls from the previously estimated 9.3 to 9.1 percent, reducing the count of people who are poor by 15 million. This is a modest change compared with previous updates of PPP data. The paper also assesses the methodological stability between the 2011 and 2017 PPPs, scrutinizes large changes at the country level, and analyzes higher poverty lines with the 2017 PPPs. -
Publication
Identifying the Poor: Accounting for Household Economies of Scale in Global Poverty Estimates
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2022-10)Estimates of the number of people living in extreme poverty, as reported by the World Bank, figure prominently in international development dialogue and policy. An assumption underpinning these poverty counts is that there are no economies of scale in household size—a family of six needs three times as much as a family of two. This paper examines the sensitivity of global estimates of extreme poverty to changing this assumption. The analysis rests on nationally representative household surveys from 162 countries covering 98 percent of the population estimated to be in extreme poverty in 2017. The paper compares current-method estimates with a constant-elasticity scale adjustment that divides total household consumption or income not by household size but by the square root of household size. While the regional profile of extreme poverty is robust to this change, the determination of who is poor changes substantially—the poverty status of 270 million people changes. The paper then shows that the measure that accounts for economies of scale is significantly more correlated with a set of presumed poverty covariates (years of schooling, literacy, asset index, working in agriculture, access to electricity, piped drinking water, and improved sanitation).