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 …

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 …

The authors provide new evidence on the extent to which absolute poverty has urbanized in the developing world, and the … role that population urbanization has played in overall poverty reduction. They find that one-quarter of the world … helped reduce absolute poverty in the aggregate but did little for urban poverty. Over 1993-2002, the count of the "$1 a day …

While the incidence of extreme poverty in China fell dramatically over 1980-2001, progress was uneven over time and … pattern of growth mattered. Rural economic growth was far more important to national poverty reduction than urban economic …). Rising inequality within the rural sector greatly slowed poverty reduction. Provinces starting with relatively high …