On October 15, 2015, World Bank Group President Jim Yong Kim announced the World Bank Group’s commitment to support the 78 poorest countries to implement a multi-topic household survey every three years between 2016 and 2030, for monitoring progress toward ending extreme poverty and boosting shared prosperity.
... See More + This paper estimates the resource requirements to achieve the objectives of implementing 390 surveys across 78 International Development Association countries from 2016 to 2030, and providing direct technical assistance to the national statistical offices on all facets of survey design, implementation, and dissemination toward timely production of quality household survey data. The approach to the costing exercise is unique, as it makes use of detailed data on actual survey implementation and technical assistance costs from a group of countries, unlike previous attempts at costing household survey data gaps. The required total budget, in accordance with the survey design features recommended by the World Bank Household Survey Strategy, is estimated at US$945 million for the period of 2016-2030. Of this, US$692 million is projected to cover the survey implementation costs across 78 countries, and US$253 million is projected to cover the costs of direct technical assistance to be provided to the national statistical offices.
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Policy Research Working Paper WPS7951 JAN 24, 2017
This paper presents a new demographic profile of extreme and moderate poverty, defined as those living on less than $1.90 and between $1.90 and $3.10 per day in 2013, based on household survey data from 89 developing countries.
... See More + The face of poverty is primarily rural and young; 80 percent of the extreme poor and 75 percent of the moderate poor live in rural areas. Over 45 percent of the extreme poor are children younger than 15 years old, and nearly 60 percent of the extreme poor live in households with three or more children. Gender differences in poverty rates are muted, and there is scant evidence of gender inequality in poor children's educational attainment. A sizable share of the extreme and moderate poor, 40 and 50 percent, respectively, have completed primary school. Compared with the extreme poor, the moderate poor are significantly more likely to have completed primary school and are less likely to work in agriculture. After conditioning on other individual and household characteristics, having fewer than three children, having greater educational attainment, and living in an urban area are strongly and positively associated with economic well-being. The results reinforce the central importance of households in rural areas and those containing large numbers of children in efforts to reduce extreme poverty, and are consistent with increased educational attainment and urbanization hastening poverty reduction.
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Policy Research Working Paper WPS7844 OCT 02, 2016
Nepal made remarkable progress in poverty reduction between 1995 and 2010, a period coinciding with a decade-long violent conflict followed by tumultuous post-conflict recovery.
... See More + Although improving agricultural productivity was long regarded as instrumental to lifting the living conditions of Nepal's impoverished rural areas, a bulk of the observed poverty reduction has come as a result of exogenous improvements in economic opportunities for poor Nepalis outside Nepal's borders. About 50 percent of the poverty reduction witnessed between 1995 and 2010 was associated with growth in labor incomes, particularly in nonagricultural activities. Private remittance receipts account for a little over a quarter of the total poverty reduction seen in Nepal. This is consistent with increased nonfarm diversification of rural households as well as the increase in nonfarm wages over the period. Household demographic changes, brought about by a sharp decline in fertility rates and the changing dependency structure as a result of migration, have also played an important role.
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Policy Research Working Paper WPS7830 SEP 21, 2016
This paper is the first to systematically test the robustness of shared prosperity estimates to different methodological choices using a sample of countries from all regions in the world.
... See More + The tests that are conducted include grouped versus microdata, nominal welfare aggregate versus adjustment for spatial price variation, and different treatment of income with negative and zero values. The empirical results reveal an only minimal impact of the proposed tests on shared prosperity estimates. Nevertheless, there are important caveats. First, spatial adjustment can change the ranking of households, affecting the distribution of the population in the bottom 40 percent. Second, the negligible impact of spatial deflation holds only if price adjustments are carried out consistently over time. Finally, the treatment of negative and zero income numbers can potentially lead to substantial differences in shared prosperity, depending on the magnitude of negative income and the share of households with negative and zero numbers across years.
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Policy Research Working Paper WPS7611 MAR 18, 2016
The Millennium Development Goal of halving the incidence of extreme poverty from its 1990 level will be achieved in 2015, and the international development community is now moving to a new goal of “ending extreme poverty.”
... See More + However, the data needed to monitor progress remain severely limited. During the 10 year period between 2002 and 2011, as many as 57 countries have zero or only one poverty estimate. This paper refers to such lack of poverty data as “data deprivation,” because the poor are often socially marginalized and voiceless, and the collection of objective and quantitative data is crucial in locating them and formulating policy to help them exit extreme deprivation. This paper studies the extent of data deprivation and proposes targets for ending data deprivation by 2030—the year by when the international community aims to end extreme poverty. According to the analysis in this paper, this target is ambitious but possible, and achieving it is necessary to be able to declare the end of extreme poverty with confidence.
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Policy Research Working Paper WPS7252 APR 28, 2015
The Inequality in Focus series aims at informing the public debate on equity, inequality of opportunity, and socioeconomic.This issue has the following headlines : Ending extreme poverty and promising and promoting shared prosperity; Increasing opportunities and improving income mobility for the poor.
... See More + This issue takes a closer look at the World Bank Group's twin goals of ending extreme poverty and promoting shared prosperity. Should they be prioritized? Might they compete for attention and resources within countries? The authors explore these questions and more. The issue also includes an interview with Professor Raj Chetty, an award-winning economist and Harvard professor, on increasing opportunities and improving income mobility for the poor. His work on how the quality of teaching at all levels of education can substantially improve the outcomes and opportunities for students may have important implications for education in low-, middle-, and high-income countries alike.
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The World Bank has recently adopted a target of reducing the proportion of population living below US$1.25 a day at 2005 international prices to 3 percent by 2030.
... See More + This paper reviews different projection methods and estimates the global poverty rate of 2030 modifying Ravallion (2013)'s approach in that it introduces country-specific economic and population growth rates and takes into account the effect of changes in within-country inequality. This paper then identifies key obstacles to meeting the target and proposes a simple intermediate growth target under which the global poverty rate can be reduced to 3 percent by 2030. The findings of the analysis lend support to Basu (2013)'s argument that accelerating growth is not enough and sharing prosperity within and across countries is essential to end extreme poverty in one generation.
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Policy Research Working Paper WPS6740 JAN 01, 2014
Yoshida, Nobuo; Uematsu, Hiroki; Sobrado, Carlos E.Disclosed
Although the world witnessed an unprecedented pace of poverty reduction over the last decades, reducing the number of people living in extreme poverty by more than 700 million, approximately 1.2 billion people remained entrenched in destitution in 2010.1 In order to leverage developing country efforts and galvanize the international development community to exert concerted effort to end extreme poverty, the World Bank has established the twin goals of ending extreme poverty by 2030 and promoting shared prosperity by fostering income growth of the bottom 40 percent of the population in every country.
... See More + Ending extreme poverty in just one generation is a formidable challenge by all accounts that requires a thorough understanding of the state of the poor. The objective of this note is to analyze some of the diverse characteristics of 1.2 billion poor people who are the focus of the poverty reduction efforts of governments and the international development community. Despite the impressive progress in the fight against poverty in the developing world as a whole, the progress has been much slower in Low Income Countries (LICs). Poverty for middle and high income countries fell by more than a half since 1981. For LICs, however, extreme poverty fell by less than a third.
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