Share of population living in extreme poverty
What you should know about this indicator
- Extreme poverty here is defined as living below the International Poverty Line of $2.15 per day.
- The data is measured in international-$ at 2017 prices – this adjusts for inflation and for differences in the cost of living between countries.
- Depending on the country and year, the data relates to either disposable income or consumption per capita, depending on the country and year.
- Non-market sources of income, including food grown by subsistence farmers for their own consumption, are taken into account.
Related research and writing
Related data
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the International Poverty Line and how is it set?
There is no single definition of poverty. Our understanding of the extent of poverty and how it is changing depends on which definition we have in mind.
What are international-$ and why are they used to measure incomes?
Much of the economic data we use to understand the world – for instance on the goods and services bought or produced by households, firms and governments, or the incomes they receive – is initially recorded in terms of the units in which these transactions took place. That means this data starts out being expressed in a variety of local currencies – as so many rupees, US dollars, or yuan, etc. – and without adjusting for inflation over time. This is known as being in ‘current prices’, or in ‘nominal’ terms.
How comparable is the World Bank data on household incomes across time or between countries?
How does the World Bank produce global and regional estimates of poverty and inequality from national data?
Sources and Processing
This data is based on the following sources
How we process data at Our World in Data
All data and visualizations on Our World in Data rely on data sourced from one or several original data providers. Preparing this original data involves several processing steps. Depending on the data, this can include standardizing country names and world region definitions, converting units, calculating derived indicators such as per capita measures, as well as adding or adapting metadata such as the name or the description given to an indicator.
At the link below you can find a detailed description of the structure of our data pipeline, including links to all the code used to prepare data across Our World in Data.
Notes on our processing step for this indicator
For a small number of country-year observations, the World Bank PIP data contains two estimates: one based on income data and one based on consumption data. In these cases we keep only the consumption estimate in order to obtain a single series for each country.
You can find the data with all available income and consumption data points, including these overlapping estimates, in our complete dataset of the World Bank PIP data.
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