rest of the world (that is, has growth systematically been less poverty-reducing in Sub-Saharan Africa relative to other regions), (ii) has the GEP changed over time (that is, has economic growth on average become more or less poverty-reducing over time), and (iii) are there variables that are amenable through policy that are robustly correlated with the extent to which economic growth translates into improved monetary living standards at the household level?

The analysis in this paper shows that, at the global level, the GEP is remarkably robust: Based on 575 comparable growth spells between 1981 and 2021, we find an average GEP of -2 with respect to survey means, the same as found by Ravallion (2004) in a far smaller sample. The GEP with respect to growth in GDP per capita is higher, at -2.8. In addition, the GEP has not changed through time, suggesting that the recent slowdown in global poverty reduction is mainly due to slowing growth. Our results confirm previous findings that the GEP is substantially lower in SSA, an effect that is mainly driven by a lower passthrough between growth in GDP per capita (or, alternatively, growth in household final consumption expenditure from national accounts) and growth in household consumption as measured from surveys. Finally, we find that the extent to which economic growth translates into improved monetary welfare at the household level is mediated by social stability/peace, the provision of basic public services (literacy and primary education), access to basic infrastructure (electricity, sanitation, and drinking water) and a country’s economic structure (sectoral structure of employment and value added and rents from natural resources).

This paper proceeds as follows: Section 2 introduces the data used in the analysis and presents descriptive statistics on the GEP, disaggregated by region, time period, and other salient dimensions. Section 3 uses a regression framework to test, conditional on differences in initial conditions, whether there are regional disparities in the extent to which economic growth translates into poverty reduction and whether elasticities have changed over time. This section also tests whether the extent to which economic growth translates into improved household welfare is mediated by certain policy variables. The final section concludes.

# 2. Data description

We use data from the Poverty and Inequality Platform (World Bank, 2022b) which replaced PovcalNet, the World Bank’s database for monitoring of global poverty (see World Bank, 2022c for a description of data sources and methods used).<sup>4</sup> The database contains income or consumption distributions from nationally representative household surveys typically carried out or supervised by national statistical offices or international agencies, used for national and international poverty monitoring. Following the traditional approach of the research on the GEP, we create a database of “spells” by combining each pair of consecutive surveys within every country. By construction, only countries with at least two comparable household surveys (and hence one spell) are included in the database of spells. This results in a dataset of 1,604 spells based on 1,870 nationally representative household surveys for 139 countries between 1969 and 2021. Countries presented in the database accounted for 95.1 percent of global population in 2019 (and 95.4 percent of population in the “developing world<sup>5</sup> ”).

The distribution of consecutive spells by regions is shown in Table 1. The majority of spells are from two regions with frequent (mostly annual) poverty surveys: Europe and Central Asia and Latin America and

> 4 The Poverty and Inequality Platform replaced PovcalNet in March 2022. 5 The world excluding high-income countries.

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