Welcome to 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 (1 and 2) by Chen and Ravallion and in the World Development Indicators (2007). 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.

The PPPs used here have not yet been updated based on the newly available price data from the 2005 ICP, as released on December 17, 2007. The updating process is underway. Until this is completed, we have removed the option of manually changing the PPPs in PovcalNet.

WDI 2007

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.
(To replicate the World Bank's aggregation result, as in the WDI 2004, click here)

Recently available data

In response to user requests, we have added a number of new features to PovcalNet. 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. We have also added some new functions to PovcalNet, including new poverty and inequality indices and the decile distributions of income or consumption.

Updated: Dec., 2007

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