choice of DOU (absolute) or DB (relative) approach does not matter much. The most striking result is that while rural areas accommodate more than half of the poor populations in many countries, the mass of poverty is more concentrated in urban areas than previously thought. By switching from the official urban definitions to the DOU and DB approaches, the number of SSA countries with more than 80 percent of poor populations living in rural areas decreases from 13 to 8 and 2 countries, respectively. Furthermore, in 4 of 16 SSA countries more than half of the poor populations reside in urban areas. We also find that, unlike poverty rates, the choice of DOU or DB approach to delineating urban areas makes a critical difference to the spatial distribution of poor populations.

The remainder of the paper is structured as follows. Section 2 provides a brief background on the framework of global poverty measurement and urban delineation—the variation in urban definitions across countries and pros and cons of different urban delineation methodologies. Section 3 describes the data used in this paper. Section 4 presents the empirical approach to integrating the new globally consistent urban classifications into the global poverty framework. Section 5 reports the results, followed by a discussion and conclusions in Section 6.

# **2 Global poverty measurement and urban delineation**

## **2.1 Global poverty measurement**

Global poverty is measured using individual or household welfare proxies, such as consumption expenditures or income, along with international poverty lines and price indexes to account for price differences.<sup>7</sup> To measure poverty, household budget surveys are used to aggregate consumption expenditures for each household (Deaton and Zaidi, 2002; Mancini and Vecchi, 2022). These expenditures are then converted to per capita consumption expenditures by dividing them by the number of household members. The World Bank defines different thresholds for international poverty lines, including the extreme poverty line ($2.15 per capita per day in 2017 PPP terms), the lower-middle-income poverty line ($3.65), and the upper-middle-income poverty line ($6.85) (World Bank, 2022).<sup>8</sup> To make household consumption expenditures comparable to poverty lines, they need to be adjusted using price indexes. The purchasing power parity (PPP) index is used to account for currency exchange ratios and price level differences across countries. Additionally, the consumer price index (CPI) is used to adjust for price differences over time, while a spatial deflator is employed to account for subnational price differentials (Amendola et al., 2023; Nakamura and Yoshida, 2021).

The poverty status of an individual is measured as follows. Real consumption expenditures of individual _i_ in region _r_ in country C in year _t_ , which we denote as _REXP_<sup>_C_</sup> _it_<sup>,iscalculatedas:</sup> where _NEXP_<sup>_C_</sup> _it_<sup>isthenominalconsumptionexpenditureoftheindividualand</sup><sup>_π_</sup> _i_<sup>_CNr_(</sup><sup>_i_)</sup><sup>_t_</sup> is a spatial price deflator that adjusts for cost-of-living differences between region _r_ and the national level ( _N_ ). To determine an individual’s poverty status in relation to the global poverty line expressed in US$ in 2017 PPP terms, the level of consumption expenditure is converted using the following equation: where _CPI_<sup>_C_</sup> 2017 _, t_<sup>adjustsforthepricedifferencesbetweenthesurveyyear</sup><sup>_t_and2017incountry</sup> and _PPP C,_ 2017 adjusts for the differences in the currency exchange ratios and price levels

> 7For the sake of simplicity, we refer to consumption, instead of income, as a welfare measure in the remainder of this paper.

> 8The international poverty line is derived as the median of the national poverty lines of low-income countries, while the lower-middle-income and higher-middle-income poverty lines, respectively, are the median national poverty lines of lower-middle-income and upper-middle-income countries.

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