The paper presents a major overhaul to the World Bank's past estimates of global poverty, incorporating new and better … data. Extreme poverty-as judged by what quot;povertyquot; means in the world's poorest countries-is found to be more … pervasive than we thought. Yet the data also provide robust evidence of continually declining poverty incidence and depth since …

The authors report new estimates of measures of absolute poverty for the developing world over 1981-2004. A clear trend … no sustained progress in reducing the number of poor, with rising poverty counts in some regions, notably Sub …-Saharan Africa. There are encouraging signs of progress in reducing the incidence of poverty in all regions after 2000, although it …