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Reducing inequality is front and center of the current economic policy agenda. Multilateral institutions like the IMF and the World Bank have accepted that high inequality leads to macroeconomic instability and lowers growth and that lower inequality helps make growth sustainable in the long run. But there is no magic bullet.
This week saw the release of the World Bank’s updated global poverty counts. There is new country-level data on poverty and inequality underlying these revisions. But the big change is that the numbers are now anchored to the 2011 Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) rates for consumption from the International Comparisons Program (ICP). Previously the numbers were based on the prior ICP round for 2005.
We are delighted to see that Nora Lustig, a CGD non-resident fellow and head of the Tulane University Commitment to Equity Institute is one of eight distinguished economists appointed to the core group of a new Global Poverty Commission announced this week by World Bank Chief Economist Kaushik Basu.
Ending extreme poverty is likely to be one of the UN Sustainable Development Goals for 2030. So it is a good idea to figure out what that entails. And it turns out that it’s become more complex in the last year or so. That’s because new price data, 2011 Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) estimates, were released in 2014 and the World Bank’s global poverty database, PovcalNet, also had a substantial update.
Related Research
This is the latest in a series of CGD blogs suggesting improvements to the SDG targets.
The first target of the first goal of the Sustainable Development Goals is to “eradicate extreme poverty for all people everywhere” by 2030. The second target is to “reduce at least by half the proportion of…. [people] living in poverty…..according to national definitions.”
The United States has an interest in a prosperous, secure Mexico—the second largest customer for American exporters. Is that interest adequately served by US policy?
One of the World Bank’s two goals for developing countries is to “share prosperity,” which it measures by the growth rate in mean consumption (or income) for the poorest 40 percent of the population. That metric has the appeal of simplicity, but it tells us nothing at all about how rising prosperity — or economic contraction — is being shared among the poorest 40 percent.
The purchasing-power rates (PPPs) from the 2011 International Comparison Program (ICP) suggest lower inequality and poverty in the world than was thought based on prior ICP data. However, there are some continuing and (as yet) poorly resolved concerns about the data revisions implied by the 2011 ICP.
You may find the answer surprising, but the most recent data show that the world as a whole is becoming more equal, driven by fast growth rates of China and India and slower growth rates in rich countries. A decrease in the US mean income from 2008 to 2011, for instance, makes global convergence of people’s incomes a lot easier to achieve.
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