PovcalNet

PovcalNet is an interactive computational tool that allows you to replicate the calculations made by the World Bank's researchers in estimating the extent of absolute poverty in the world, including the $1 a day poverty measures, as published in the background papers by Chen and Ravallion and in the 2007 World Development Indicators. PovcalNet also allows you to calculate the poverty measures under different assumptions and to assemble the estimates using alternative country groupings or for any set of individual countries of you're choosing. PovcalNet is self-contained; it has reliable built-in software that quickly does the relevant calculations for you from the built-in database.

In August 2008, the World Bank released the first major update of the developing world's poverty estimate to incorporate the findings of 2005 International Comparison Program (ICP). THe new poverty estimates combine the 2005 Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) exchange rates for household consumption from the 2005 ICP with data from 675 houshold surveys across 116 developing countries spanning the period 1981-2005. Over 1.2 million randomly sampled households were interviewed for the 2005 estimate, representing 96 percent of the population of the developing world.

If you would like to duplicate the World Bank's regional poverty estimates please click the first button; or go to the second button to form your own group of countries. Note that the Bank's official estimates use unit record household data whenever possible while PovcalNet uses grouped distributions. We do this both for computational ease and to avoid the need to obtain permissions to release unit-record data that has typically been provided to the Bank, or purchased from, the statistical offices of member governments. As a result of this difference, there are some small discrepancies between online replications and the Bank's official estimates, such as published in the WDI.

Naturally new survey data become available to us more or less continuously. We shall now be including these data in regular updates to PovcalNet. If you want your estimates of poverty measures at country level to include the most recent available data, please click the third button at the right. However, aggregated poverty estimates at regional level incorporating these new data are not yet available. At roughly three yearly intervals we do a major update of the data base, including re-estimating the regional poverty profile back in time and incorporating new estimates of the Purchasing Power parity exchange rates we use.

PovcalNet is a product of the World Bank's research department, the Development Research Group. The PovcalNet software was designed by Qinghua Zhao and Yongming Du. The global poverty monitoring database is managed by Shaohua Chen and Prem Sangraula. Martin Ravallion provides overall guidance. A great many colleagues at the World Bank have helped the team in obtaining the necessary data for PovcalNet. An important acknowledgement goes to the staff of over 100 governmental statistics offices that collected the primary household and price survey data. The Bank's Development Data Group has provided the 2005 consumption PPPs, population and other National Accounts data used here.