Estimates of the historic and future scale and location or “geography” of global poverty by income/expenditure have a long and contentious history. In recent projections made on global poverty, methods and assumptions vary so widely it is impossible to compare studies in a systematic way...

This paper argues that the distribution of global poverty has changed and that most of the world’s poor no longer live in countries officially classified as low-income countries (LICs). It is estimated that the majority of the world’s poor, or up to a billion people, live in middle-income...