price adjustment data. An assessment on the comparability of poverty data has been conducted by the Global Poverty Working Group (GPWG), a group of poverty measurement experts in the World Bank. Given the large volume of the database, the GPWG started this assessment from the most recent data. When this note was prepared, the assessment was not completed across all years. Therefore, our assessment on data availability, particularly on poverty data before the 2000s, should be seen as provisional.

It is worth noting that some of the data sets underlying poverty estimates published in the WDI database are not directly accessible to the World Bank’s poverty economists. However, even in such atypical cases, the poverty economists still have sufficient confidence in the robustness of the poverty estimates to include them in the WDI database. We decided to include these estimates in our notion of available poverty data as the challenge for them is not availability _per se_ but access, which is a different challenge.

A candidate database that we could have drawn from is the International Household Survey Network or IHSN database, a repository of various types of household surveys including LSMS (Living Standard Measurement Surveys), DHS (Demographic and Health Surveys), LFS (Labor Force Surveys), MICS (Multiple Indicator Cluster Survey), etc.. A recent paper by Demombynes and Sandefur (2014) utilizes the IHSN database to understand data production and access across countries and estimate the financial costs of filling data gaps. The IHSN database has an advantage of being able to identify whether surveys are ‘open, i.e., accessible on-line.’ However, since the focus is on poverty data, the WDI database was the preferred choice. That said, comparisons between these two databases give us very useful insights on how surveys are planned and carried out in the field. We will come back to this point in section 6, where we discuss practical concerns in addressing the “Data Deprivation”.

# **3. Key Findings**

The availability of poverty data has increased sharply since the early 1990s (Figure 1). A first rapid increase occurred between 1990 and 1996 when data points for those particular years increased from 13 to 36, driven largely by the Europe and Central Asia (ECA), Latin America and Caribbean (LAC), and Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) regions. At the beginning of the 1990s, poverty data from the ECA region were not available in the WDI database, mainly due to the fact that many post-Soviet states did not yet exist or data were not accessible to the World Bank. The number of poverty estimates in the ECA region increased significantly since 1992 and rose to an average of eight data points per year between 1992 and 1999. During this time, the number of poverty estimates also increased significantly in both the LAC and SSA regions.

The years 2000 to 2005 brought about another spike in the availability of poverty data; the number of countries with available poverty data almost doubled from 37 countries in 2000 to 60 countries in 2010 and remained fairly constant since then with 62 countries producing poverty estimates in 2011. The ECA region was again a key driver of this second wave of improvements in data availability. The number of poverty estimates in the ECA region increased from 9 in 2000 to 26 in 2004 while the number of poverty estimates in other regions fluctuated, but overall showed improvements. The average of all data points in a given 10 year period illustrates significant improvements in Sub-Saharan Africa with increases in the availability of data points by almost 50 percent from 5.1 in the 1990s to 7.5 in the 2000s.

It is worth noting that the decline in the availability of data points for 2012 and 2013 is not indicative of a decline in actual surveys carried out. Processing of data and estimation of poverty is time-consuming, and in many developing countries poverty estimates become available in the WDI one to two years after surveys 5