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 …

for half of economic growth. Finally, institutions can affect poverty and equity, although the effects seem generally …

such social effects on welfare call for a reconsideration of how we assess global poverty, but they do not support standard … measures of relative poverty. The paper argues instead for using a weakly-relative measure as the upper-bound complement to the … lower-bound provided by a standard absolute measure. New estimates of global poverty are presented, drawing on 850 household …