The paper critically assesses prevailing measures of global poverty. A welfarist interpretation of global poverty lines … falling incidence of poverty globally over the last 30 years. This is mainly due to lower absolute poverty counts in the … standard. The vast bulk of poverty, both absolute and relative, is now found in the developing world …

characteristics, i.e. fundamental forces, against the alternative that there are poverty traps. Taking geographical variables as … fundamental characteristics, we find that we can reject fundamental forces in favor of a poverty trap model with high and low …

The paper provides new measures of global poverty that take seriously the idea of relative-income comparisons but also … acknowledge a deep identification problem when the latent norms defining poverty vary systematically across countries. Welfare … model of relative-income comparisons calibrated to data on national poverty lines. Both bounds indicate falling global …

The traditional approach to poverty measurement puts no explicit weight on success at increasing the typical level of … available surveys for the developing world over 1981-2011, the expected value of the floor is about half the $1.25 a day poverty …