ABSTRACT
Since 1981, the World Bank’s staff has compiled data on the number of people around the
world who subsist on an amount equivalent to $1.25 per day, evaluated in terms of 2005
prices. Year after year thereafter, tabulations of these data-typically completed after a
lag of a few years-indicated either that the absolute population of people getting by with
such meager resources, or the share of the global population doing so, had increased. For
many years, the World Bank’s data indicated that both measures had risen simultaneously.
