Monitoring Global Poverty

In 2013, the World Bank Group announced two goals that would guide
its operations worldwide. First is the eradication of chronic extreme
poverty bringing the number of extremely poor people, defined as those
living on less than 1.25 purchasing power parity (PPP)†“adjusted dollars a
day, to less than 3 percent of the world’s population by 2030.The second is
the boosting of shared prosperity, defined as promoting the growth of per
capita real income of the poorest 40 percent of the population in
each country.

In 2015, United Nations member nations agreed in New York to a set of
post-2015 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the first and foremost
of which is the eradication of extreme poverty everywhere, in all its forms.
Both the language and the spirit of the SDG objective reflect the growing
acceptance of the idea that poverty is a multidimensional concept that
reflects multiple deprivations in various aspects of well-being. That said,
there is much less agreement on the best ways in which those deprivations
should be measured, and on whether or how information on them should
be aggregated.

Monitoring Global Poverty: Report of the Commission on Global Poverty
advises the World Bank on the measurement and monitoring of global
poverty in two areas:

What should be the interpretation of the definition of extreme
poverty, set in 2015 in PPP-adjusted dollars a day per person?

What choices should the Bank make regarding complementary
monetary and nonmonetary poverty measures to be tracked and
made available to policy makers?

The World Bank plays an important role in shaping the global debate on
combating poverty, and the indicators and data that the Bank collates and
makes available shape opinion and actual policies in client countries, and,
to a certain extent, in all countries. How we answer the above questions
can therefore have a major influence on the global economy.