External and Coauthored Posts

My personal profile in World Bank Blogs

Updated estimates of the impact of COVID-19 on global poverty

We estimate the impact of COVID-19 on poverty by comparing poverty projections that use the new GDP forecasts with poverty projections that use the GDP forecast before COVID-19 took off, in this case the GEP forecasts from January. Under the baseline scenario we estimate that COVID-19 will push 71 million into extreme poverty , measured at the international poverty line of $1.90 per day. With the downside scenario, this increases to 100 million

The impact of COVID-19 (Coronavirus) on global poverty: Why Sub-Saharan Africa might be the region hardest hit

COVID-19 is likely to cause the first increase in global poverty since 1998. Though Sub-Saharan Africa so far has been hit relatively less by the virus from a health perspective, our projections suggest that it will be the region hit hardest in terms of increased extreme poverty

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

East Asia and Pacific has continued its downward trend, reducing the poverty headcount ratio at the international poverty line from 2.3% in 2015 to 1.3% in 2018, driven by decreases in poverty in China and the Philippines. In contrast, spurred by the conflicts in Yemen and Syria, the Middle East and North Africa region has seen a sharp reversal, with the poverty rate increasing from around 2.4% in 2011-2013 to 3.8% in 2015 and 7.2% in in 2018. In Latin America, poverty has largely stagnated, increasing slightly from 4.1% in 2015 to 4.4% in 2018, partially due to an increase in the number of poor in Brazil

How we mass-produced reproducible Human Capital Project country briefs

...each of us started to work on our assigned tasks—compiling indicators from multiple public sources, composing interactive text that varies with data, creating charts, and integrating all the inputs in Rmarkdown. The technology facilitated a seamless collaboration between the authors and made last-minute changes possible at relatively low effort

Apples to apples — PovcalNet introduces a new comparability indicator

As part of the World Bank’s September 2019 global poverty update published a few weeks ago, metadata on the comparability of poverty estimates within countries over time was added to the PovcalNet website

85% of Africans live on less than $5.50 per day

In East Asia and Pacific, there have been drastic changes in the distribution of the population across different poverty lines between 1990 and 2015. As shown above, East Asia and Pacific has been more successful than Sub-Saharan Africa in the fight against extreme poverty. East Asia and Pacific has also seen an expansion of the middle class from less than 1% to almost one-fifth, and a rapid increase in the population living between $5.50 and $15 to almost half of the regional population. This has not happened in Sub-Saharan Africa.

Estimating global poverty in R and Stata

The World Bank’s global poverty measures published through the PovcalNet website can now be accessed directly from within R and Stata. The R package povcalnetR and the Stata command povcalnet offer the same functionality as the website, namely the estimation of poverty at any poverty line for individual countries, groups of countries, or entire regions.

September 2019 global poverty update from the World Bank

This update includes revisions to 18 surveys from four countries. As a result of the revised data, the estimate of the global $1.90 headcount ratio for 2015 increases slightly from 9.94% to 9.98%, whereas the number of poor increases from 731.0 million to 734.5 million people, which is a small change relative to past updates.