Comparable Poverty and Inequality Trends

The country-level, regional, and global time trends in the World Bank's Poverty and Inequality Platform (PIP) are partly driven by changes in how welfare is measured within a country over time. This dataset constructs comparable poverty and inequality trends following the approach outlined in the Global Poverty Monitoring Technical Note "Constructing Comparable Global Poverty Trends." It does so by bridging gaps between non-comparable household surveys using national accounts growth data. Concretely, whenever comparable household surveys are available, it uses the information from these household surveys. Whenever they are unavailable, it assumes that households' welfare grows in accordance with national accounts, following the extrapolation rule used in PIP. The method relies on coarse assumptions regarding the relationship between growth in national accounts and welfare as measured in household surveys. For any given country, bridging comparability gaps with country-tailored solutions is likely to increase accuracy.