Guest Lecture | Monitoring Global Poverty: Measurement Challenges & Developments

The World Bank, which serves as the custodian for monitoring progress towards the SDGs on poverty, reports that significant progress has been made in reducing extreme poverty from 36 per cent in 1990 to 10 per cent in 2015. While this reduction has been steady over the years, it has also been uneven across countries. In 2015, when the rate was 10 per cent, the proportion of people living in extreme poverty was less than 3 per cent in more than half the countries of the world.

Since 2015, the relatively steady decline in poverty has decelerated and more recently, with the onset of the COVID pandemic, the world has experienced the largest increases in global poverty in decades. The recent reversal of progress motivates a need for better methodologies in identifying and monitoring the poor with greater precision and timeliness.

Similarly, the uneven progress across countries in reducing extreme poverty has revealed a need for new concepts of poverty to help improve the lives of those who may live on more than the international poverty line but are nonetheless poor by other definitions. This presentation will provide an overview of how the World Bank measures global poverty, describe trends, forecasts, and geographic profiles of poverty, explains recent changes in the value of the international poverty line, and concludes with a discussion of measurement challenges in improving the comparability and quality of the poverty estimates.

Dean Jolliffe

Dean Jolliffe is a Lead Economist at the World Bank in the Global Poverty & Inequality team and the Living Standards and Measurement Study team. He was also co-director of the 2021 World Development Report: Data for Better Lives.

Prior to joining the World Bank, he was a research economist with the Economic Research Service of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, an assistant professor at Charles University Center for Economic Research and Graduate Education in Prague, an adjunct professor at Georgetown University Public Policy Institute, and a postdoctoral fellow at the International Food Policy Research Institute. Dean currently holds appointments at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies, the Institute for the Study of Labor, and the Global Labor Organization. He received his PhD in Economics from Princeton University

Click here for his full profile.

Masterclass

There will also be a masterclass where four students will have the opportunity to present their research to Dean Jolliffe. Click here for more information