Ranil Dissanayake actually just published an article in Asterisk about the history of the poverty line concept. The dollar-a-day (now $1.25 a day or something) line was kind of arbitrary and kind of not:
rather than make their own judgment on what constituted sufficient living, they could instead rely on the judgment of poor countries themselves. They would simply take an average of the poorest countries in the world and declare this to be the global minimum of human sufficiency
noting further in a footnote that
Of course, things are never quite so pure: The bank was closely involved in the development of national poverty lines around the world, so there was some element of circularity to the development of the global line.
The whole article is very interesting, worth a read for people in this space.
Ranil Dissanayake actually just published an article in Asterisk about the history of the poverty line concept. The dollar-a-day (now $1.25 a day or something) line was kind of arbitrary and kind of not:
noting further in a footnote that
The whole article is very interesting, worth a read for people in this space.