Abstract
This chapter examines measurement challenges in monitoring global poverty in a manner that maintains common standards across countries to ensure comparability. The chapter is premised on the idea that the tools developed in the late 1980s and early 1990s for monitoring extreme poverty need to be adapted for a world where the profile of poverty now looks very different. The data and tools for monitoring extreme poverty need to be improved so that financial and human resources are used more effectively in the fight against extreme poverty. Efforts to monitor change in global counts of extreme poverty face a world in which price differentials (across and within countries) will continue to evolve, age composition and size of households will change in ways that are systematically correlated with growth, and heterogeneity in questionnaire design will continue to increase as economies of the world become more formalized and methods for data capture change. All of these issues change measured poverty counts independent of any true change in poverty. Disentangling these effects from true changes in global poverty will be a central challenge of poverty measurement moving forward toward the 2030 targets of the Sustainable Development Goals and beyond.
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Acknowledgments
Eva Sierminska is the section editor responsible for this chapter. The article has benefitted from valuable comments from Eva Sierminska and an anonymous referee. The article has also benefited from background discussions on global poverty measurement methods and the development of figures in this chapter by Andres Castaneda Aguilar, Samuel Kofi Tetteh Baah, Roy Katayama, Maria Ana Lugo, Daniel Mahler, Martha Mendoza, Minh Cong Nguyen, Espen Beer Prydz, Marta Schoch, Umar Serajuddin, Dhiraj Sharma and Nishant Yonzan. The authors gratefully acknowledge funding support from the UK government through the Data and Evidence for Tackling Extreme Poverty (DEEP) Research Programme. There is no conflict of interest. The findings, interpretations, and conclusions expressed in this paper are entirely those of the authors. They do not necessarily represent the views of the World Bank and its affiliated organizations, or those of the Executive Directors of the World Bank or the governments they represent.
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Jolliffe, D., Lakner, C. (2023). Measuring Global Poverty in a Changing World. In: Zimmermann, K.F. (eds) Handbook of Labor, Human Resources and Population Economics. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-57365-6_223-1
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