Fact Sheet: An Adjustment to Global Poverty Lines

Why did the World Bank decide to update the International Poverty Line, and why now?

As differences in price levels across the world evolve, the global poverty line has to be periodically updated to reflect these changes. Since 2015, the last update, we have used $1.90 as the global line. As of fall 2022, the new global line will be updated to $2.15.

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March 2020 global poverty update from the World Bank: New poverty estimates for 2018

The March 2020 global poverty update added more than 200 new surveys to PovcalNet,

figure 1.2

Table 1. Poverty estimates for reference year 2018, different poverty lines

bringing the total number of surveys to more than 1,900. New poverty estimates for the reference year 2018 are now included for some regions, and the previously published global and regional estimates from 1981 to 2015 have been revised, reflecting data revisions and the availability of new data. More details on the revisions can be found in Atamanov et al. (2020).

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