The World Poverty Clock
is a tool to monitor progress against
poverty
Poverty is a state or condition in which an individual lacks the financial resources and essentials for a basic standard of living. Poverty can have diverse Biophysical environmen ...
globally, and regionally. It provides real-time poverty data across countries. Created by the Vienna-based NGO, World Data Lab, it was launched in Berlin at the
re:publica conference in 2017, and is funded by Germany's
Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development.
The clock seeks to address a gap in development data around social progress indicators, starting with poverty numbers, and tries to align them with economic and demographic indicators like
Gross Domestic Product
Gross domestic product (GDP) is a monetary measure of the total market value of all the final goods and services produced and rendered in a specific time period by a country or countries. GDP is often used to measure the economic performanc ...
(GDP), and population clocks
[U.S. Census Bureau. ''Population Clock'' Available at: https://www.census.gov/popclock/] and
forecast respectively, which already have real-time and forward looking estimates.
Methodology
The World Poverty Clock uses publicly available data on income distribution, stratification, production, and consumption, provided by different and multiple international organizations, most notably the
UN,
WorldBank, and the
International Monetary Fund
The International Monetary Fund (IMF) is a major financial agency of the United Nations, and an international financial institution funded by 191 member countries, with headquarters in Washington, D.C. It is regarded as the global lender of las ...
. These organizations compile data provided to them by governments in each country. In a few cases, governments fail to provide data. The World Poverty Clock uses models to estimate poverty in these countries, covering 99.7% of the world’s population. It also models how individual incomes might change over time, using IMF growth forecasts for the medium-term complemented by long-term
shared socio-economic pathways developed by th
Institute of International Applied Systems Analysisnear Vienna, Austria, and similar analysis developed by the
OECD
The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD; , OCDE) is an international organization, intergovernmental organization with 38 member countries, founded in 1961 to stimulate economic progress and international trade, wor ...
.
References
Measurements and definitions of poverty
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