national poverty lines used in deriving the $1.25 international line, Ferreira et al. (2016) updated the $1.25 line to $1.90 a day at 2011 PPP. While there has been some debate about the $1.90 line (see, for example, Klasen et al., 2016), it has since become widely accepted in the development community, as exemplified by its adoption in the UN’s _Sustainable Development Goals_ .

National lines have also been used to set international relative poverty lines (Atkinson and Bourguignon, 2001; Chen and Ravallion, 2001, 2011, 2013; Jolliffe and Prydz, 2017). While for a number of the OECD countries the national lines are directly proportional to the mean or median, that is not true of most countries in the world. The methods of setting poverty lines vary, with numerous free parameters, including nutritional requirements, the composition of the food bundles and the allowances made for non-food spending. Through their parameterization at the country level, national lines can be interpreted as social subjective lines that reflect prevailing concepts of what “poverty” means in each country.<sup>16</sup> It is then reasonable to expect that the variation in national lines across countries reflects differences in the comparison income.

We have compiled a new data set of 145 national poverty lines. (A Statistical Annex is available describing the data sources.) This has entailed an extra 47 developing (non-OECD) countries on top of those used by Ravallion et al. (2009) as well as 24 OECD countries (not included in Ravallion et al., 2009).<sup>17</sup> For the developing countries, these are official national poverty lines or (when these could not be found) they are the lines set by the World Bank, as part of its analytic work at country level. For the US we have used the official poverty line. For the rest of the OECD countries we have used 60% of the per-capita median, though we also test sensitivity to using 50% of the median. Both the poverty lines and consumption levels are converted to per capita $US values using the PPP exchange rates for consumption from the 2011 ICP (World Bank, 2015).<sup>18</sup> The survey dates range from 2004 to 2012, with a median of 2011.

> 16 The social subjective line is the level of income below which people in a specific social context tend to judge themselves as “poor” but above which they tend to see themselves as not poor. For further discussion and references see Ravallion (2016a, Chapter 4).

> 17  Some countries also have national cut-off lines for means-tested social assistance. These are not strictly poverty lines so we chose not to include them.

> 18  All poverty lines are for specific years (often tied to specific survey dates) and consumption data are for that year or as close as possible; both poverty lines and consumption were then converted to 2011 prices using the country’s consumer price index (or the most appropriate index available), and then converted to PPP $’s using the 2011 PPP for consumption. When poverty lines are quoted as “per equivalent adult” (mainly OECD) we have re-scaled to “per capita” units by multiplying by the ratio of mean equivalent adults per household to mean household size.

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