Who is Not Poor? Dreaming of a World Truly Free of Poverty

Pritchett, Lant

Oxford University Press on behalf of the World Bank

关键词: ABSOLUTE POVERTY;    ABSOLUTE POVERTY LINE;    ABSOLUTE TERMS;    AVERAGE INCOMES;    CHILD MORTALITY;   

DOI  :  10.1093/wbro/lkj002
RP-ID  :  76759

学科分类：社会科学、人文和艺术（综合）

来源: World Bank Open Knowledge Repository

【 摘 要 】

When the World Bank dreams of 'aworld free of poverty,' what should it be dreaming? Inmeasuring global income or consumption expenditure poverty,the World Bank has widely adopted the $1 a day standard as alower bound. Because this standard is based on poverty linesin the poorest countries, anyone with income or expendituresbelow this line will truly be poor. But there is noconsensus standard for the upper bound of the global povertyline: above what level of income or expenditures is someonetruly not poor? This article proposes that the World Bankcompute its lower and upper bounds in a methodologicallyequivalent way, using the poverty lines of the poorestcountries for the lower bound and the poverty lines of therichest countries for the upper bound. The resulting upperbound global poverty line will be 10 times higher than thecurrent lower bound and at least 5 times higher than thecurrently used alternative lower bound of $2 a day. And intracking progress toward a world free of poverty, the WorldBank should compute measures of global poverty using avariety of weights on the depth and intensity of poverty fora range of poverty lines between the global lower and upperbounds. For instance, rather than trying to artificiallyforce the global population of 6.2 billion (a billion is1,000 million) into just two categories 'poor' and'not poor,' with the new range of poverty linesthe estimates would be that 1.3 billion people are'destitute' (below $1 a day), another 1.6 billionare in 'extreme poverty' (above $1 a day but below$2 dollar a day), and another 2.5 billion are in'global poverty' (above extreme poverty but belowthe upper bound poverty line).