WB reviewing poverty line
The World Bank is reviewing whether its current poverty line, which is largely based on African data at 2005 international prices, will require an upward revision amid availability of new data and changes in exchange rates.
The multilateral lender now uses a poverty line of $1.25 a day on purchasing power parity and that is being reviewed now, said Zahid Hussain, lead economist of the WB's Dhaka office.
New data to gauge the poverty line is available, while the purchasing power parity exchange rates have changed.
“In this context, the WB is reviewing all the countries' data to come to a conclusion on whether we need to adjust the poverty line upwards,” he said during a meeting with reporters at his office in the capital.
His comments came after Asian Development Bank (ADB) recently suggested measuring the poverty line on the basis of $1.51 PPP.
The Manila-based lender came up with the new poverty line after taking into consideration the rapidly rising food prices and vulnerability to shocks.
The report termed the existing scale of gauging poverty outdated and inappropriate for Asia, as it was largely based on African and the 1988-2005 data. The number of poor in Asia will shoot up by a billion if more realistic criteria are used for measuring poverty, the ADB said in its report.
Despite a decade of improving living standards fuelled by economic growth and money from overseas workers, about 47 million Bangladeshis still live in poverty, with 26 million of them being in extreme poverty, according to the WB. Based on the $1.25 a day line, the poverty rate in Bangladesh declined 5.5 percentage points to 43.5 percent in 2010 from 2005.
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