World Bank promotes new poverty measure

The World Bank has launched its new $1.25 a day poverty measure (see post of 25 May 2008). Under the new measure a greater number of people are classified as poor although the proportion of people living in poverty is still falling over time.

The number living in poverty is 400m more than previously assumed but, according to the release:

“New poverty estimates published by the World Bank reveal that 1.4 billion people in the developing world (one in four) were living on less than US$1.25 a day in 2005, down from 1.9 billion (one in two) in 1981.”

A new paper by Martin Ravallion and Shaohua Chen discusses the changes in more detail.