The Future of Global Poverty in a Multi-Speed World : New Estimates of Scale and Location, 2010-2030

The data available for assessing the current status and trends of global poverty has significantly improved. And yet serious contentions remain. At the same time, a set of recent papers has sought to use these datasets to make poverty projections. Such projections have significant policy implications because they are used to inform debates on the future scale, nature, and objectives of international aid. Unfortunately, those papers have not yielded a consistent picture of future (and even current) global poverty even though their estimates are all derived from the same basic (PPP and distribution) datasets. In this paper we introduce a new model of growth, inequality and poverty. This new model allows for systematic, methodologically transparent, comparative analyses of estimates of poverty in the future based on a range of different methods. We use the model to explore how estimates of the scale and location of future poverty varies by approach