The World Bank’s Poverty and Inequality Platform (PIP) released updated global poverty estimates. Depending on the availability of survey data, global and regional poverty data are reported up to 2022. For the first time, PIP also includes survey-level, regional and global poverty nowcasts up to the current year. See the What’s New document for more details.
The revised poverty trends are similar to those previously published. In 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic caused global extreme poverty to rise by 0.85 percentage points, reaching 9.7 percent (Figure 1). This surge in extreme poverty was largely driven by South Asia, where extreme poverty increased by 2.4 percentage points, and by 1.27 percentage points in Sub-Saharan Africa in the same year.
Figure 1: Global and regional poverty trends, 1990 - 2024
As shown in Figure 1, in 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic reversed the historic progress in poverty reduction in all regions, except Latin America and the Caribbean where governments used fiscal stimulus to alleviate economic hardship for low-income households. In the subsequent years, economic recovery occurred, though unevenly across countries and regions. By now, global extreme poverty has returned to pre-pandemic levels. However, low- and lower-middle-income countries have been less resilient, facing additional shocks from inflationary pressures following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, which slowed down their pace of economic recovery. The Middle East and North Africa region experienced the largest regression in extreme poverty over the past few years, even before COVID-19, primarily due to fragility in the region, compounded by a lack of consistent and recent data.
As explained in the What’s New document, revisions have been made to 69 existing surveys and 16 new surveys were added to the PIP database, bringing the total number of surveys to nearly 2,400. PIP now has survey data for 170 economies, with Qatar being the latest addition. Table 1 illustrates the resulting revisions to regional and global poverty estimates for the latest year with sufficient data coverage, at both the international poverty line of $2.15 and the higher line of $6.85 a day.
In 2022, the global poverty headcount ratio at the International Poverty Line ($2.15 per person per day, 2017 PPP) has remained rounded to 9 percent, with a marginal upward revision in the total number of extreme poor from 712 to 713 million. By 2024 this number is expected to decline to about 692 million extreme poor in the world.
This PIP update also includes several changes to the methods, which have small impacts on the estimates. In particular, all surveys are now bottom censored at $0.25 per person per day (in 2017 PPPs), and the estimates for grouped data are based on synthetic distributions. See the What’s New document for more details. These changes were made because PIP now reports the World Bank’s new measure of shared prosperity, the Global Prosperity Gap. Furthermore, PIP now reports the aggregates for the number of economies with high inequality, also part of the World Bank’s new suite of shared prosperity measures. These new measures and trends will be discussed in more detail in the forthcoming Poverty, Prosperity, and Planet Report.
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The authors gratefully acknowledge financial support from the UK Government through the Data and Evidence for Tackling Extreme Poverty (DEEP) Research Program.
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