Publication: Global Poverty Revisited Using 2021 PPPs and New Data on Consumption
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Date
2025-06-05
ISSN
Published
2025-06-05
Author(s)
Foster, Elizabeth
Ibarra, Gabriel Lara
Tettah-Baah, Samuel
Editor(s)
Abstract
Recent 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.
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“Foster, Elizabeth; Jolliffe, Dean Mitchell; Ibarra, Gabriel Lara; Lakner, Christoph; Tettah-Baah, Samuel. 2025. Global Poverty Revisited Using 2021 PPPs and New Data on Consumption. Policy Research Working Paper; 11137. © World Bank. http://hdl.handle.net/10986/43300 License: CC BY 3.0 IGO.”
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