Tag Archives: Poverty

The World Bank article March 2023 global poverty update from the World Bank: the challenge of estimating poverty in the pandemic (3/29/2023) reports on poverty updates:

Global poverty estimates were updated today on the Poverty and Inequality Platform (PIP). This update includes new regional poverty aggregates in 2020 and 2021 for Latin America and the Caribbean, and in 2020 for Europe and Central Asia, and the group of advanced countries. These are the regions for which we now have sufficient survey data available during the COVID-19 pandemic. In total, 113 new country-years have been added, bringing the total number of surveys to more than 2,100.

The summary with calculus terms:

It is still the case that global poverty has been falling since the 1990s, and at a slower rate since 2014 (World Bank 2022). Extreme poverty has been falling in all regions, except the Middle East and North Africa due to conflict and fragility (World Bank 2020). Roughly 60% of the world’s extreme poor in 2019 lived in Sub-Saharan Africa alone, while 81% of the global poor at the poverty line of $3.6.

The PIP itself is a page worth exploring. It doesn’t look like much but if you start clicking you’ll find there is much to discover. Try the calculator on the bottom right of the graph or trying clicking a country.

The World Bank Data Blog post Where the extreme poor live by Marta Schoch, Christoph Lanker and Melina Fleury (10/12/2020) provides the graph copied here.

Although the number of poor people has fallen in many regions, most notably East Asia and Pacific, and more recently South Asia, there has been no reduction in Sub-Saharan Africa, where the regional poverty rate remains above 40% in 2017.

The Middle East and North Africa has also seen an increase in the number of poor in recent years, driven largely by the economies in the region that are affected by conflict.

The post has links to reports with data.