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 "poverty" 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 …

At the outset of China's reform period, the country had a far higher poverty rate than for Africa as a whole. Within … five years that was no longer true. This paper tries to explain how China escaped from a situation in which extreme poverty …