The Developing World is Poorer Than We Thought, but No Less Successful in the Fight Against Poverty

Chen, Shaohua ; Ravallion, Martin

Washington, DC:World Bank

关键词: ABSOLUTE POVERTY;    ABSOLUTE POVERTY LINE;    AGGREGATE POVERTY;    CHILD MORTALITY;    CONSUMER PRICE INDEX;   

DOI  :  10.1596/1813-9450-4703
RP-ID  :  WPS4703

学科分类：社会科学、人文和艺术（综合）

来源: World Bank Open Knowledge Repository

【 摘 要 】

The paper presents a major overhaul tothe World Bank's past estimates of global poverty,incorporating new and better data. Extreme poverty-as judgedby what "poverty" means in the world'spoorest countries-is found to be more pervasive than wethought. Yet the data also provide robust evidence ofcontinually declining poverty incidence and depth since theearly 1980s. For 2005 we estimate that 1.4 billion people,or one quarter of the population of the developing world,lived below our international line of $1.25 a day in 2005prices; 25 years earlier there were 1.9 billion poor, or onehalf of the population. Progress was uneven across regions.The poverty rate in East Asia fell from almost 80 percent tounder 20 percent over this period. By contrast it stayed ataround 50 percent in Sub-Saharan Africa, though with signsof progress since the mid 1990s. Because of lags in surveydata availability, these estimates do not yet reflect thesharp rise in food prices since 2005.