In the 2000s, global inequality fell for the first time since the Industrial Revolution, driven by a decline in the dispersion of average incomes across countries. Between 1988 and 2008, a period of rapidly increasing global integration, income growth was largest for the global top 1 percent and...

This poverty diagnostic documents changes in welfare and living standards in the West Bank and Gaza over the period 2011 to 2017. Since the last poverty assessment for these territories, in 2011, the economic constraints facing them have worsened. The 2011 poverty assessment covered the period...

This technical report describes the methodology and data used to produce small area poverty estimates for the Palestinian territories. The first section presents the methodology. The second section describes the data, and the technical challenges in estimating poverty at the locality level. The...

This paper constructs and tests the robustness of consistently measured poverty trends in the Islamic Republic of Iran after 2008, using international poverty lines based on U.S. dollars at 2011 purchasing power parity. The constructed estimates reveal three distinct periods of welfare in the...

This paper is the first to systematically test the robustness of shared prosperity estimates to different methodological choices using a sample of countries from all regions in the world. The tests that are conducted include grouped versus microdata, nominal welfare aggregate versus adjustment...

Shared prosperity is the World Bank's second Twin Goal, introduced in 2013. It is defined as the growth in household per capita income or consumption of the poorest 40 percent of the population. The Global Database of Shared Prosperity (GDSP) is the database that is used to monitor progress of...

Estimates of the number of people living in extreme poverty, as reported by the World Bank, figure prominently in international development dialogue and policy. An assumption underpinning these poverty counts is that there are no economies of scale in household size - a family of six needs three...

Estimates of the number of people living in extreme poverty, as reported by the World Bank, figure prominently in international development dialogue and policy. An assumption underpinning these poverty counts is that there are no economies of scale in household size-a family of six needs three...

This paper evaluates different methods for nowcasting country-level poverty rates, including methods that apply statistical learning to large-scale country-level data obtained from the World Development Indicators and Google Earth Engine. The methods are evaluated by withholding measured poverty...