What percentage of people in your country or region lives in poverty and how have income distributions changed over the past 20 years?
Are income gaps wider in poor countries than in rich, and what happens when an economy grows?
In keeping with its Open Data Initiative to make more of its information accessible to the general public, the World Bank has launched an innovative data portal where visitors can query and download national or regional poverty statistics, use Apps to view and map trends in poverty and inequality, and view trends over time.
The new Poverty & Equity Data site at povertydata.worldbank.org/ offers visitors easily comparable statistics that is critical for anybody seeking to keep poverty reduction on the world’s agenda.
"There’s a huge demand for this kind of data,” said Jaime Saavedra, director of the World Bank’s Poverty Reduction & Equity department. “So we’ve made an effort to make poverty statistics easier to understand for journalists, academics, students, government officials – anybody with an interest in this type of information.”
The dynamic portal gives visitors an entry point to explore global poverty indicators, interactive maps, regional comparisons, and a vast amount of research reports from the World Bank’s leading data and poverty experts.
It also gives visitors access to several of the Bank’s poverty measurement tools, including ADePT and PovcalNet, the source of the Bank’s dollar-a-day poverty estimates.
There's a huge demand for this kind of data. So we've made an effort to make poverty statistics easier to understand.
The Poverty & Equity portal provides a comprehensive window to all poverty statistics disseminated by the World Bank and will be regularly updated as new numbers become available. The Bank’s Development Research Group will publish new global dollar-a-day poverty data in early 2012, for example, that will immediately be reflected on the site.
“Since the beginning of scientific poverty measurement in the late nineteenth century, based on household surveys, the measures have helped mobilize public action for fighting poverty,” said Martin Ravallion, the Development Research Group's director. “Thus it is crucial that the measures are readily accessible to the public. This new portal is one further step in that direction.”
The World Bank has published national and international poverty statistics for decades, making it a destination for economists, development organizations and others who need such information for their work or research. In 2010, the Bank made its huge storehouse of data accessible to the public for free and took a number of steps to make the information easier to use.
Data is based on household surveys.
The new data portal “offers further insights into the World Bank’s core mission of reducing poverty,” said Shaida Badiee, director of the Bank’s Development Data Group.
“It’s in line with the Bank’s open-data vision and offers reliable and timely data, using new and exciting tools to access and visualize data.”
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