hence what we think we know continues to rely heavily on the accuracy of the poverty estimates generated by the bank this has occurred in the midst of an expanding global economy which has resulted on average in higher per capita incomes in both developed and developing countries sachs united nations a in these countries information on the depth severity and duration of poverty may be limited and available information may be unreliable to address some of these data gaps the research programme of the world bank poverty and inequality group has been engaged in improving current data as well as methods and tools for poverty and inequality analysis through inter alia producing new householdlevel data notably through the group s living standards measurement study monitoring poverty and inequality using householdlevel data developing more reliable poverty maps and rolling out computational tools such as adept and povcalnet see