Share of population below 60% of median income or consumption
What you should know about this indicator
- This is a measure of relative poverty – it captures the share of people whose income is low by the standards typical in their own country.
- Depending on the country and year, the data relates to either disposable income or consumption per capita, depending on the country and year.
- Non-market sources of income, including food grown by subsistence farmers for their own consumption, are taken into account.
Related research and writing
Related data
Frequently Asked Questions
How comparable is the World Bank data on household incomes across time or between countries?
Because there is no global survey of incomes, researchers need to rely on available national surveys. Such surveys are designed with cross-country comparability in mind, but because the surveys reflect the circumstances and priorities of individual countries at the time of the survey, there are some important differences. In collating this survey data the World Bank takes steps to harmonize it where possible, but comparability issues remain.
Sources and Processing
This data is based on the following sources
How we process data at Our World in Data
All data and visualizations on Our World in Data rely on data sourced from one or several original data providers. Preparing this original data involves several processing steps. Depending on the data, this can include standardizing country names and world region definitions, converting units, calculating derived indicators such as per capita measures, as well as adding or adapting metadata such as the name or the description given to an indicator.
At the link below you can find a detailed description of the structure of our data pipeline, including links to all the code used to prepare data across Our World in Data.
Notes on our processing step for this indicator
Measures of relative poverty are not directly available in the World Bank PIP data. To calculate this metric we take the median income or consumption for the country and year, calculate a relative poverty line – in this case 60% of the median – and then run a specific query on the PIP API to return the share of population below that line.
For a small number of country-year observations, the PIP data contains two estimates: one based on income data and one based on consumption data. In these cases we keep only the consumption estimate in order to obtain a single series for each country.
You can find the data with all available income and consumption data points, including these overlapping estimates, in this dataset.
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