Monitoring Global Poverty

REPORT by the Commission on Global Poverty, The World Bank

The World Bank's Commission on Global Poverty has submitted recommendations on how to more comprehensively measure and monitor global poverty in support of the Bank Group's goals of ending extreme poverty by 2030 and boosting shared prosperity.

In its report, the Commission acknowledges the challenges posed by its recommendations, including the limited statistical resources available to poor countries, the need for collaboration across countries and agencies, and different national circumstances among low, and middle-income countries.

The Commission, set up in 2015 by the World Bank, brought together 24 of the world's leading poverty experts, under the chairmanship of Sir Anthony Atkinson, a leading authority on inequality, Centennial Professor at the London School of Economics, and a Fellow of Nuffield College, Oxford University.

The Commission's final report includes a set of 21 recommendations. Highlights include recommendations on broadening the conception of poverty to include non-monetary measures of deprivation; a suggestion to introduce a societal headcount measure of global poverty, which combines absolute and relative elements of poverty, and a recommendation to publish a global profile of the poor.

Visit the World Bank webpage to read the report in full.