of the poor using a much more comprehensive sample, based on household data from 73 low- and middle-income countries in the 2000s. That analysis primarily focused on analyzing historical trends in poverty at the country level, however, and only scratched the surface by profiling a few key characteristics of the poor.<sup>4</sup> Furthermore, little is known about those living just above the extreme poverty line, who account for a considerable share of the population. In the 89 countries considered in this study, 20%, or around a billion people, are estimated to live on more than the extreme poverty line of $1.90 per person per day (in 2011 PPP terms) but less than $3.10 per day in 2013. Better understanding the characteristics of this group, which we term the “moderate poor”, is important because many of them are materially deprived and considered poor by national standards. Identifying the characteristics that distinguish the moderate poor from the extreme poor may also provide a measure of insight into key factors that drive reductions in extreme poverty.

This paper presents a comprehensive demographic profile of the extreme and moderate poor by age, gender, household composition, educational attainment, urban/rural residence, and employment in the agricultural sector. The profile draws on the richest and most updated collection of household survey data on poverty assembled to date – the Global Micro Database (GMD). From this database, surveys were pooled across 89 countries, each collected since 2009. The results are based on the same welfare aggregates that are used to compute the regional and global poverty estimates published by the World Bank, which are often used by the countries themselves to estimate national poverty.<sup>5</sup> This paper is also be the first to compare the extreme poor and moderate poor for a large number of countries, and to document patterns of missing data in this type of global analysis. The analysis “lines up” survey-based poverty estimates to a common year, 2013, and shows that this procedure has mild impacts on the profile of the poor.

There are five main findings. First, the poor tend to be rural and young, slightly more so than previously thought. About 80 percent of the extreme poor and 76 percent of the moderate poor live in areas classified, according to national definitions, as rural. These shares are likely overestimated, because in many cases the welfare aggregates have not been adjusted to account for the lower cost of living in rural areas. Data from South Asia, however, suggest that the magnitude of this rural bias is modest.<sup>6</sup> With respect to age, nearly 45 percent of the extreme poor are children under 15 years old, and over 60 percent of the extreme poor live in households with three or more children. Second, gender differences in poverty rates are muted. This is because poverty status is identified at the household level, whereas gender disparities are most apparent in individual-level indicators such as education, autonomy in decision making and labor market outcomes. Third, a primary school education is not sufficient to exit poverty. A sizeable minority of the extreme poor -- about

> 4 In addition, as discussed below, the welfare aggregates used to profile the poor in that study were not the same ones that were used to construct the World Bank’s official poverty estimates.

> 5 Countries in Europe and Central Asia and Latin America and the Caribbean are exceptions, where the income aggregate used for global poverty monitoring has been standardized across the region and may differ from the aggregates used for national poverty estimates. In other regions, the welfare aggregates used are not consistent across countries, and vary for example in their treatment of housing and health expenditures, as well as their use of spatial deflators as discussed below.

> 6 See section 3.7 below.

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