Monitoring Global Poverty (ePub)

In 2013, the World Bank Group announced two goals that would guideits operations worldwide. First is the eradication of chronic extremepoverty bringing the number of extremely poor people, defined as thoseliving on less than 1.25 purchasing power parity (PPP)†"adjusted dollars aday, to less than 3 percent of the world's population by 2030.The second isthe boosting of shared prosperity, defined as promoting the growth of percapita real income of the poorest 40 percent of the population ineach country.In 2015, United Nations member nations agreed in New York to a set ofpost-2015 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the first and foremostof which is the eradication of extreme poverty everywhere, in all its forms.Both the language and the spirit of the SDG objective reflect the growingacceptance of the idea that poverty is a multidimensional concept thatreflects multiple deprivations in various aspects of well-being. That said,there is much less agreement on the best ways in which those deprivationsshould be measured, and on whether or how information on them shouldbe aggregated.Monitoring Global Poverty: Report of the Commission on Global Povertyadvises the World Bank on the measurement and monitoring of globalpoverty in two areas:What should be the interpretation of the definition of extremepoverty, set in 2015 in PPP-adjusted dollars a day per person?What choices should the Bank make regarding complementarymonetary and nonmonetary poverty measures to be tracked andmade available to policy makers?The World Bank plays an important role in shaping the global debate oncombating poverty, and the indicators and data that the Bank collates andmakes available shape opinion and actual policies in client countries, and,to a certain extent, in all countries. How we answer the above questionscan therefore have a major influence on the global economy.