>ok, stupid question, but when the world bank says that (as of 1999,
>iirc) 2.1 billion people lived on less than $1/day using the dollar
>as a marker of "purchasing power parity", does that mean the buying
>power of US$1 no matter where you are in the world, or does it mean
>the local equivalent of what US$1 would buy in the states?
The latter. From <http://www.worldbank.org/poverty/mission/up2.htm>:
>When estimating poverty world-wide, the same reference poverty line
>has to be used, and expressed in a common unit across countries.
>Therefore, for the purpose of global aggregation and comparison, the
>World Bank uses reference lines set at $1 and $2 per day in 1993
>Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) terms (where PPPs measure the relative
>purchasing power of currencies across countries). It has been
>estimated that in 1999 1.2 billion people world-wide had consumption
>levels below $1 a day -- 23 percent of the population of the
>developing world and 2.8 billion lived on less than $2 a day. These
>figures are lower than earlier estimates, indicating that some
>progress has taken place, but they still remain too high in terms of
>human suffering, and much more remains to be done. And it should be
>emphasized that for analysis of poverty in a particular country, the
>World Bank always uses poverty line(s) based on norms for that
>society.
I know the estimates have been criticized (e.g. by Reddy and Pogge) as too low, but the official stats are pretty damning as it is.
Doug