Poverty Where People Live: What Do National Poverty Lines Tell us About Global Poverty?

Debate about national and international poverty measurement continued to evolve (see for example Abu-Ismail et al., 2012). The international poverty lines of US$1.25 and US$2/day are, respectively, the average of the national poverty lines for the poorest 15 countries and the average for all developing countries. While those lines allow us to compare countries in monetary terms, at national level, all countries define poverty, using various approaches. So what difference does it make if, instead, we look at how many poor people there are in the world, based on how poverty is defined in the countries where those people live (rather than by international poverty lines)? Difference Between National and International Poverty Rates, Selected Countries (percentage points) To answer this, we added up all the country-level poverty data based on national poverty definitions to produce a new and different perspective on global poverty, based on national poverty measures in 160 countries (see Gentilini and Sumner, 2012). Three major findings emerge. First, there are 1.5 billion people living in nationally defined poverty, 1 billion of