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All the information included on this explorer is accessible to obtain in GitHub, alongside a variety of different poverty and inequality metrics.
The place is that this knowledge sourced from?
This data explorer is collated and adapted from the World Bank’s Poverty and Inequality Platform (PIP).
The World Financial institution’s PIP knowledge is a big assortment of family surveys the place steps have been taken by the World Financial institution to harmonize definitions and strategies throughout international locations and over time.
In regards to the comparability of family surveys
There is no global survey of incomes. To understand how incomes across the world compare, researchers need to rely on available national surveys.
Such surveys are partly designed with cross-country comparability in mind, but because the surveys reflect the circumstances and priorities of individual countries at the time of the survey, there are some important differences.
Income vs expenditure surveys
One important issue is that the survey data included within the PIP database tends to measure folks’s revenue in high-income international locations, and folks’s consumption expenditure in poorer international locations.
The 2 ideas are carefully associated: the revenue of a family equals their consumption plus any saving, or minus any borrowing or spending out of financial savings.
One vital distinction is that, whereas zero consumption shouldn’t be a possible worth – folks with zero consumption would starve – a zero revenue is a possible worth. Which means that, on the backside finish of the distribution, revenue and consumption can provide fairly totally different photos about an individual’s welfare. As an example, an individual dissaving in retirement could have a really low, and even zero, revenue, however have a excessive stage of consumption nonetheless.
The hole between revenue and consumption is larger on the prime of this distribution too, richer households have a tendency to avoid wasting extra, that means that the hole between revenue and consumption is larger on the prime of this distribution too. Taken collectively, one implication is that inequality measured by way of consumption is mostly considerably decrease than the inequality measured by way of revenue.
In our Data Explorer of this knowledge there’s the choice to view solely revenue survey knowledge or solely consumption survey knowledge, or as an alternative to pool the information out there from each varieties of survey – which yields better protection.
Different comparability points
There are a number of other ways in which comparability across surveys can be limited. The PIP Methodology Handbook gives abstract of the comparability and knowledge high quality points affecting this knowledge and the way it tries to deal with them.
In collating this survey knowledge the World Financial institution takes a variety of steps to harmonize it the place attainable, however comparability points stay. These have an effect on comparisons each throughout international locations and inside particular person international locations over time.
To assist talk the latter, the World Financial institution produces a variable that teams surveys inside every particular person nation into extra comparable ‘spells’. Our Data Explorer gives the choice of viewing the information with these breaks in comparability indicated, and these spells are additionally indicated in our knowledge download.
World and regional poverty estimates
Along with data for individual countries, the World Bank also provides global and regional poverty estimates which aggregate over the available country data.
Surveys are not conducted annually in every country however – coverage is generally poorer the further back in time you look, and remains particularly patchy within Sub-Saharan Africa. You can see that visualized in our chart of the number of surveys included in the World Bank data by decade.
To be able to produce world and regional combination estimates for a given yr, the World Financial institution takes the surveys falling closest to that yr for every nation and ‘lines-up’ the information to the yr being estimated by projecting it forwards or backwards.
This lining-up is mostly performed on the idea that family incomes or expenditure develop in keeping with the expansion charges noticed in nationwide accounts knowledge. You may learn extra concerning the interpolation strategies utilized by the World Financial institution in Chapter 5 of the Poverty and Inequality Platform Methodology Handbook.
How does the information account for inflation and for variations in the price of dwelling throughout international locations?
To account for inflation and price differences across countries, the World Bank’s data is measured in international dollars. This is a hypothetical currency that results from price adjustments across time and place. It is defined as having the same purchasing power as one US-$ would in the United States in a given base year. One int.-$ buys the same quantity of goods and services no matter where or when it is spent.
There are many challenges to making such adjustments and they are far from perfect. Angus Deaton (Deaton, 2010) gives dialogue of the difficulties concerned in worth changes and the way this pertains to world poverty measurement.
However in a world the place worth variations throughout international locations and over time are massive it is very important try to account for these variations in addition to attainable, and that is what these changes do.
In September 2022, the World Financial institution up to date its methodology, and now makes use of international-$ expressed in 2017 costs – up to date from 2011 costs. This has had little impact on our total understanding of poverty and inequality all over the world. However poverty estimates for specific international locations range considerably between the previous and up to date methodology. You may learn extra about this replace in our article From $1.90 to $2.15 a day: the updated International Poverty Line.
To permit for comparisons with the official knowledge now expressed in 2017 international-$ knowledge, the World Financial institution continues to launch its poverty and inequality knowledge expressed in 2011 international-$ as properly. We’ve constructed a Data Explorer to let you examine these, and we make all figures out there by way of each units of costs in our data download.
Absolute vs relative poverty strains
This dataset provides poverty estimates for a range of absolute and relative poverty lines.
An absolute poverty line represents a fixed standard of living; a threshold that is held constant across time. Within the World Bank’s poverty data, absolute poverty lines also aim to represent a standard of living that is fixed across countries (by converting local currencies to international-$). The International Poverty Line of $2.15 per day (in 2017 international-$) is the best known absolute poverty line and is used by the World Bank and the UN to measure extreme poverty around the world.
The value of relative poverty lines instead rises and falls as average incomes change within a given country. In most cases they are set at a certain fraction of the median income. Because of this, relative poverty can be considered a metric of inequality – it measures how spread out the bottom half of the income distribution is.
The idea behind measuring poverty in relative terms is that a person’s well-being depends not on their own absolute standard of living but on how that standard compares with some reference group, or whether it enables them to participate in the norms and customs of their society. For instance, joining a friend’s birthday celebration without shame might require more resources in a rich society if the norm is to go for an expensive meal out, or give costly presents.
Our dataset includes three commonly-used relative poverty lines: 40%, 50%, and 60% of the median.
Such lines are most commonly used in rich countries, and are the main way poverty is measured by the OECD and the European Union.Extra lately, relative poverty measures have come to be utilized in a world context. The share of individuals dwelling under 50 per cent of median revenue is, for example, one of many UN’s Sustainable Development Goal indicators. And the World Financial institution now produces estimates of world poverty utilizing a Societal Poverty Line that mixes absolute and relative elements.
When evaluating relative poverty charges all over the world, nevertheless, it is very important take into account that – since average incomes are up to now aside – such relative poverty strains relate to very totally different requirements of dwelling in wealthy and poor international locations.
Does the information account for non-market revenue, similar to meals grown by subsistence farmers?
Many poor folks at present, as up to now, depend on subsistence farming somewhat than a financial revenue gained from promoting items or their labor in the marketplace. To take this into consideration and make a good comparability of their dwelling requirements, the statisticians that produce these figures estimate the financial worth of their residence manufacturing and add it to their revenue/expenditure.
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