ABSTRACT
The purpose of the paper is twofold. First, it provides poverty estimates for low-income countries, consistent with national accounts statistics and hence comparable over time and across countries. We argue that such consistent estimates are essential for the study of long-term trends in poverty as well as the analysis of the relationship between poverty and other macroeconomic variables in crosscountry empirical studies. The existing data on poverty published by the World Bank fail to satisfy the required consistency tests. For example, as we shall show in this paper, the existing estimates, compared to the national accounts consistent estimates, appear to systematically underestimate poverty in the poorest of Least Developed Countries (LDCs).
