Person: Lakner, Christoph
Development Research Group
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Inequality, Poverty reduction, Spatial prices, Poverty Measurement and Analysis, Inclusive Growth
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Development Research Group
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Last updated: June 23, 2025
Biography
Christoph Lakner is an Economist in the Development Research Group (Poverty & Inequality team) at the World Bank. He holds a DPhil, MPhil and BA in Economics from the University of Oxford. His research interests include inequality, poverty, and labor markets in developing countries. In particular, he has been working on global inequality, the relationship between inequality of opportunity and growth, implications of regional price differences for inequality, and the income composition of top incomes. He is also involved in the World Bank’s global poverty monitoring and co-leads PovcalNet, the home of the World Bank’s global poverty numbers.
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Publication Global Poverty Revisited Using 2021 PPPs and New Data on Consumption(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-06-05) Foster, Elizabeth; Jolliffe, Dean Mitchell; Ibarra, Gabriel Lara; Lakner, Christoph; Tettah-Baah, SamuelRecent improvements in survey methodologies have increased measured consumption in many low- and lower-middle-income countries that now collect a more comprehensive measure of household consumption. Faced with such methodological changes, countries have frequently revised upward their national poverty lines to make them appropriate for the new measures of consumption. This in turn affects the World Bank’s global poverty lines when they are periodically revised. The international poverty line, which is based on the typical poverty line in low-income countries, increases by around 40 percent to $3.00 when the more recent national poverty lines as well as the 2021 purchasing power parities are incorporated. The net impact of the changes in international prices, the poverty line, and new survey data (including new data for India) is an increase in global extreme poverty by some 125 million people in 2022, and a significant shift of poverty away from South Asia and toward Sub-Saharan Africa. The changes at higher poverty lines, which are more relevant to middle-income countries, are mixed.Publication June 2025 Update to the Poverty and Inequality Platform (PIP)(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-06-11) Alfani, Federica; Aaron, Danielle V.; Atamanov, Aziz; Aguilar, R.Andres Castaneda; Diaz-Bonilla, Carolina; Devpura, Nancy P.; Dewina, Reno; Finn, Arden; Fujs, Tony; Gonzalez, Maria Fernanda; Krishnan, Nandini; Kochhar, Nishtha; Kumar, Naresh; Lakner, Christoph; Ibarra, Gabriel Lara; Lestani, Diego; Liniado, Julia; Lønborg, Jonas; Mahler, Daniel G.; Mejía-Mantilla, Carolina; Montalva, Veronica; Herrera, Laura L.; Nguyen, Minh C.; Rubiano, Eliana; Sajaia, Zurab; Castro, Diana M.; Seshan, Ganesh K.; Tetteh-Baah, Samuel K.; Mendoza, Martha C. Viveros; Wu, Haoyu; Yonzan, Nishant; Wambile, AyagoThe June 2025 update to the Poverty and Inequality Platform (PIP) introduces several important changes to the data underlying the global poverty estimates. The most important change is the adoption of the 2021 Purchasing Power Parities (PPPs). In addition, new data for India has been incorporated and the existing series adjusted for comparability. This document details the changes to underlying data and the methodological reasons behind them. Depending on the availability of recent survey data, global and regional poverty estimates are reported up to 2023, together with nowcasts up to 2025. The PIP database now includes 74 new country-years, bringing the total number of surveys to over 2,400, for 172 economies.Publication Global Inequality and Economic Growth: The Three Decades before Covid-19 and Three Decades After(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-03-27) Garcia Rojas, Diana C.; Yonzan, Nishant; Lakner, ChristophGlobal income inequality captures income differences among all individuals around the world. Global inequality around the world increased from 1820 to 1990 as incomes in richer countries grew faster than incomes in relatively poorer countries. However, these trends were reversed over the three decades starting in 1990. Inequality among all citizens of the world decreased as populous and relatively poorer countries, in particular China, reduced the income gap with richer parts of the world. Growth in average incomes played a critical role in this reduction, with differences within countries contributing relatively little. The Covid-19 pandemic abruptly halted the reduction in global income inequality and was responsible for the largest increase in global income inequality in at least three decades. The future of global inequality largely depends on how incomes grow in various parts of the world. If the trends of the last three decades continue, inequality may increase as growth in those countries that drove the reduction in inequality now contributes to increasing inequality, since these countries are in the upper part of the global distribution. However, if poorer countries today grow faster than their richer peers, global inequality could continue to fall. Climate adaptation and mitigation challenges will play an increasing role in shaping country-level growth trends and thus the changes in global income inequality.Publication Predicting Income Distributions from Almost Nothing(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-01-13) Mahler, Daniel Gerszon; Schoch, Marta; Lakner, Christoph; Nguyen, Minh; Montes, JoseThis paper develops a method to predict comparable income and consumption distributions for all countries in the world from a simple regression with a handful of country-level variables. To fit the model, the analysis uses more than 2,000 distributions from household surveys covering 168 countries from the World Bank’s Poverty and Inequality Platform. More than 1,000 economic, demographic, and remote sensing predictors from multiple databases are used to test the models. A model is selected that balances out-of-sample accuracy, simplicity, and the share of countries for which the method can be applied. The paper finds that a simple model relying on gross domestic product per capita, under-5 mortality rate, life expectancy, and rural population share gives almost the same accuracy as a complex machine learning model using 1,000 indicators jointly. The method allows for easy distributional analysis in countries with extreme data deprivation where survey data are unavailable or severely outdated, several of which are likely among the poorest countries in the world.Publication September 2024 Update to the Poverty and Inequality Platform (PIP): What’s New(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-10-11) Aron, Danielle V.; Castaneda Aguilar, R. Andres; Diaz-Bonilla, Carolina; Fujs, Tony H. M. J.; Garcia R., Diana C.; Hill, Ruth; Jularbal, Lali; Lakner, Christoph; Lara Ibarra, Gabriel; Mahler, Daniel G.; Nguyen, Minh C.; Nursamsu, Samuel; Sabatino, Carlos; Sajaia, Zurah; Seitz, William; Sjahrir, Bambang Suharnoko; Tetteh-Baah, Samuel K.; Viveros Mendoza, Martha C.; Winkler, Hernán; Wu, Haoyu; Yonzan, NishantThe September 2024 update to the Poverty and Inequality Platform (PIP) introduces several changes to the data underlying the global poverty estimates. This document details these changes and the methodological reasons behind them. The database now includes 16 new country-years, bringing the total number of surveys to nearly 2,400. This update incorporates new methodologies for measuring global poverty and introduces new indicators of shared prosperity: A Prosperity Gap and the number of economies with high income inequality. It also incorporates two new analytical dashboards: growth incidence curves and poverty decompositions. Depending on the availability of recent survey data, global and regional poverty estimates are reported up to 2022. For the first time, PIP also includes country-level, regional, and global poverty nowcast estimates up to 2024. The September 2024 PIP update presents the poverty and inequality data underlying the forthcoming World Bank’s Poverty, Prosperity, and Planet Report 2024.Publication The World Bank’s New Inequality Indicator: The Number of Countries with High Inequality(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-06-11) Haddad, Cameron Nadim; Mahler, Daniel Gerszon; Diaz-Bonilla, Carolina; Hill, Ruth; Lakner, Christoph; Lara Ibarra, GabrielThe World Bank recently introduced a new key indicator to guide its work: the number of countries with high inequality, defined as a Gini index above 40. The new indicator was introduced as part of the new World Bank vision of ending poverty on a livable planet. This paper reviews why reducing inequality matters for ending poverty on a livable planet, summarizes the advantages and disadvantages of using the Gini index to track inequality, outlines challenges in measuring inequality, and discusses what a Gini threshold of 40 implies. Using the most recent data for every country, 52 countries of a total of 169 countries are classified as high inequality countries, which represents a decline from 74 countries at the beginning of the millennium.Publication The Impact of COVID-19 on Global Inequality and Poverty(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2022-10) Yonzan, Nishant; Mahler, Daniel Gerszon; Lakner, ChristophThe COVID-19 pandemic has had catastrophic economic and human consequences worldwide. This paper tries to quantify the consequences of the pandemic on global inequality and poverty in 2020. Since face-to-face household survey data collection largely came to a halt during the pandemic, a combination of data sources is used to estimate the impacts on poverty and inequality. This includes actual household survey data, where available, high-frequency phone surveys, and country-level estimates from the literature on the impact of the pandemic on poverty and inequality. The results suggest that the world in 2020 witnessed the largest increase to global inequality and poverty since at least 1990. This paper estimates that COVID-19 increased the global Gini index by 0.7 point and global extreme poverty (using a poverty line of $2.15 per day) by 90 million people compared to counterfactual without the pandemic. These findings are primarily driven by country-level shocks to average incomes and an increase in inequality between countries. Changes to inequality within countries were mixed and relatively modest.Publication A New Distribution Sensitive Index for Measuring Welfare, Poverty, and Inequality(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2023-06-22) Kraay, Aart; Lakner, Christoph; Özler, Berk; Decerf, Benoit; Jolliffe, Dean; Sterck, Olivier; Yonzan, NishantSimple welfare indices such as mean income are ubiquitous but not distribution sensitive. In contrast, existing distribution sensitive welfare indices are rarely used, often because they are difficult to explain and/or lack intuitive units. This paper proposes a simple new distribution sensitive welfare index with intuitive units: the average factor by which individual incomes must be multiplied to attain a given reference level of income. This new index is subgroup decomposable with population weights and satisfies the three main definitions of distribution sensitivity in the literature. Variants on this index can be used as distribution sensitive poverty measures and as inequality measures, with the same simple intuitive units. The properties of the new index are illustrated using the global distribution of income across individuals between 1990 and 2019, as well as with selected country comparisons. Finally, the index can be used to define the “prosperity gap” as a proposed new measure of “shared prosperity,” one of the twin goals of the World Bank.Publication What Do We Know about Poverty in India in 2017/18?(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2022-02) Edochie, Ifeanyi Nzegwu; Freije-Rodriguez, Samuel; Lakner, Christoph; Moreno Herrera, Laura; Newhouse, David Locke; Sinha Roy, Sutirtha; Yonzan, NishantThis paper nowcasts poverty in India, one of the countries with the largest population below the international poverty line of $1.90 per person per day. Because the latest official household survey dates back to 2011/12, there is considerable uncertainty about recent poverty trends in the country. Applying a pass-through and survey-to-survey methodology, extreme poverty (at the $1.90 poverty line) for India in 2017 is estimated at 10.4 percent with a confidence interval of [8.1, 11.3]. The urban and rural poverty rates are estimated at 7.2 and 12.0 percent, respectively. Across a wide range of publicly available data sources, the paper finds no evidence of an increase in poverty between 2011/12 and 2017/18.Publication Constructing Comparable Global Poverty Trends(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-06-23) Mahler, Daniel Gerszon; Foster, Elizabeth; Lakner, Christoph; Prinsloo, Zander; Tchouakam Mbouendeu, Rostand; Tetteh-Baah, Samuel K.Countries frequently revise how they measure income or consumption due to changes in data collection and questionnaire design. These changes create comparability breaks in poverty trends over time. This paper develops three methods to create global, regional, and country-level poverty trends that are comparable within countries over time. It does so by using national accounts growth to bridge non-comparable sequences. Accounting for comparability breaks creates large differences in some country-level poverty trends, but the global extreme poverty trend built from these comparable poverty series remains largely unchanged.