La Fissazione della International Poverty Line: una nuova proposta applicata al Vietnam

The poverty line, which has been set by the World Bank in 1990 at 1.08USD/day PPA contains three major errors: it does not refer to a clear definition of poverty; it uses wrong PPA factors converting national poverty lines and it is based on limited data from two countries with the highest poverty incidence. All these errors lead to a systematic underestimate of world poverty. The objective of the paper is be then to evaluate the accuracy of international poverty estimates produced by the World Bank. The case study analyzed in the paper is Vietnam, a country which experiences impressive achievements in term of poverty reduction in the last twenty years. The specific aim of this study is then twofold. Firs, it will construct a new international poverty line using different PPA conversion factors giving more weight to goods consumed by the poorest people. Second, it will design a poverty map for Vietnam using this new poverty threshold. Results indicate that using more accurate PPA conversion factors poverty rates are much higher than the current estimates and this suggest a general revision in the method of setting an international poverty threshold.