Global Poverty: Scraping distributional data from the World Bank

Abstract

The problem of measuring global poverty consistently is addressed using a family of bare bones consumption baskets (BBB). This methodology pinpoints equivalent levels of welfare, both internationally and intertemporally. Naturally, in calculating poverty rates the household consumption distributions are needed. However, those are not made available by the World Bank that collects them. To overcome this problem the python script from Dykstra et al 2014 has been updated to read-in a list of poverty lines and fetch the poverty rate on a per country/year combination. A later version of this script has now allowed for extracting the entire distribution from the World Bank and deals with the inconsistencies found in the dataset provided by Dykstra et al.