Indicators

 Monitoring poverty is important on the global development agenda as well as on the national development agenda of many countries. The World Bank produced its first global poverty estimates for  developing countries for World Development Report 1990: Poverty (World Bank 1990) using househ old  survey data for 22 countries (Ravallion, Datt, and van de Walle 1991). Since then there has been  considerable expansion in the number of countries that field household income and expenditure surveys.  The World Bank's Development Research Group maintain s a database that is updated annually as new  survey data become available (and thus may contain more recent data or revisions) and conducts a major  reassessment of progress against poverty every year. PovcalNet is an interactive computational tool that  all ows users to replicate these internationally comparable $1.90 and $3.10 a day global, regional and  country - level poverty estimates and to compute poverty measures for custom country groupings and for  different poverty lines.  The Poverty and Equity Data p ortal provides access to the database and user - friendly dashboards with  graphs and interactive maps that visualize trends in key poverty and inequality indicators for different  regions and countries. The country dashboards display trends in poverty measure s based on the national  poverty lines alongside the internationally comparable estimates, produced from and consistent with PovcalNet.

 The indicator Proportion of population below the international poverty line is defined as the percentage of the population living on less than $1.90 a day at 2011 international prices. The 'international poverty line' is currently set at $1.90 a day at 2011 international prices. 

Data are taken from the United Nations' SDG Indicators Global Database. See links below for  more information. To measure poverty across countries consistently, the World Bank’s international measures apply a common standard, anchored to what “poverty” means in the world’s poorest countries.  The current extreme poverty line is set at $1.90 a day in 2011 PPP terms, which represents the mean of the national poverty lines found in the same poorest 15 countries ranked by per capita consumption.  When measuring international poverty of a country, the international poverty line at PPP is converted to local currencies in 2011 price and is then converted to the prices prevailing at the time of the relevant household survey using the best available Consumer Price Index (CPI).  (Equivalently, the survey data on household consumption or income for the survey year are expressed in the prices of the ICP base year,  and then converted to PPP $’s.) Then the poverty rate is calculated from that survey. All inter-temporal comparisons are real, as assessed using the country-specific CPI. Interpolation/extrapolation methods areused to line up the survey-based estimates with these reference years.