Societal Poverty : A Relative and Relevant Measure

Poverty lines are typically higher in richer countries, and lower in poorer ones, reflecting the relative nature of national assessments of who is considered poor. In many high-income countries, poverty lines are explicitly relative, set as a share of mean or median income. Despite systematic variation in how countries define poverty, global poverty counts are based on fixed-value lines. To reflect national assessments of poverty in a global headcount of poverty, this paper proposes a societal poverty line. The proposed societal poverty line is derived from 699 harmonized national poverty lines, and has an intercept of