group of the World Bank’s Poverty and Equity Global Practice.<sup>7</sup> The GMD is an ongoing initiative and new surveys are added each year. As of June 2016, it contained 443 household surveys from 134 countries. The surveys are as old as 1993, but more than 90 percent of the surveys are from 2005 or later, and surveys from 2009 to 2013 account for 56 percent of the collection of surveys.

The GMD is the richest collection of nationally representative, globally harmonized household survey data on poverty.<sup>8</sup> The figures on poverty are based on a measure of household welfare, which is either household per capita income or household per capita consumption, depending on which concept is used to measure national poverty in a particular country. Of the 89 countries in our sample, income is used in 30 of them, most of which are located in Europe, Central Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean. The GMD is particularly suitable for profiling the global poor because its welfare aggregates are identical to those used to compute the global poverty estimates published by the World Bank, except for the notable exception of China.<sup>9</sup> China is a special case because the World Bank does not have access to the individual level records of the Chinese Household Budget Survey (HBS), which is the source of official Chinese poverty statistics. The World Bank’s international poverty estimates for China are instead based on an approximate distribution derived from grouped data, which cannot be used to profile the characteristics of the poor. This study therefore utilizes household level data from the 2013 Chinese Household Income Project Survey (CHIPS), made available to the public by Beijing Normal University. The CHIPS is drawn from the same sample frame as the HBS, and an analysis of an earlier round of the survey, collected in 2007, yielded similar poverty rates as the official HBS-based estimates (Zhang et al, 2014). The poverty rate for urban and rural China, derived from the 2013 HBS, is applied to the CHIPS data to generate profiles of the extreme and moderate poor in China.

The data from India also deserve special mention. In general, the results presented below are based on schedule one of the 2011 National Sample Survey (NSS), which is the primary source underlying both the estimates of poverty reported by the Indian government and the international poverty rate reported by the World Bank. The schedule one survey, however, does not collect information on labor market outcomes. Therefore, all information on sector of work is taken from schedule ten of the NSS, which collects both labor market information and sufficient information on household expenditure to construct an unofficial consumption aggregate. To calculate the poverty status of Indian workers by sector, the World Bank’s urban and rural headcount poverty rates, which are derived from the schedule one survey, are applied to the corresponding percentiles of the urban and rural distribution of schedule ten’s per capita consumption measure. Thus, the shares of agricultural workers that are below the $1.90 and $3.10 thresholds in India are estimated using the unofficial welfare aggregate collected in schedule ten.

> 7 Due to the nature of the license agreements between the World Bank and National Statistical Offices, data for most countries cannot be made publicly available.

> 8 Only one survey is not nationally representative: Argentina’s household consumption survey, the Encuesta Permanente de Hogares, which is not nationally representative and covers only about two-thirds of the country’s urban population instead. Given that the urban population accounted for about 90 percent of Argentina’s total population in 2013, the survey effectively only represents 61 percent of the national population.

> 9 For more information on how the welfare aggregates are constructed, see Ferreira et al. (2015).

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