Publication

This paper documents the construction of a data set on global poverty and inequality through a web-scraping exercise of the World Bank’s PovcalNet database. PovcalNet attempts to bring together all available survey data on household income and consumption in the developing world, but its website offers the public only limited access to the underlying data sets. The authors therefore devised a method to compile the full distributions of income or consumption available through PovcalNet into a form that can be easily downloaded and analyzed. This paper describes their methodology, discusses relevant intellectual property issues, and illustrates the usefulness of this data set.