Prosperity gap
What you should know about this indicator
- The prosperity gap indicator measures how much income would need to be multiplied to ensure everyone reaches a standard of prosperity, which is defined as $25 per person per day. This gives a sense of how far global incomes are from a basic prosperity standard.
- The data is measured in international-$ at 2017 prices – this adjusts for inflation and for differences in the cost of living between countries.
- Depending on the country and year, the data relates to income measured after taxes and benefits, or to consumption, per capita. 'Per capita' means that the income of each household is attributed equally to each member of the household (including children).
- Non-market sources of income, including food grown by subsistence farmers for their own consumption, are taken into account.
- Regional and global estimates are extrapolated up until the year of the data release using GDP growth estimates and forecasts. For more details about the methodology, please refer to the World Bank PIP documentation.
Sources and processing
This data is based on the following sources
How we process data at Our World in Data
All data and visualizations on Our World in Data rely on data sourced from one or several original data providers. Preparing this original data involves several processing steps. Depending on the data, this can include standardizing country names and world region definitions, converting units, calculating derived indicators such as per capita measures, as well as adding or adapting metadata such as the name or the description given to an indicator.
At the link below you can find a detailed description of the structure of our data pipeline, including links to all the code used to prepare data across Our World in Data.
Notes on our processing step for this indicator
For most countries in the PIP dataset, estimates relate to either disposable income or consumption, for all available years. A number of countries, however, have a mix of income and consumption data points, with both data types sometimes available for particular years.
In most of our charts, we present the data with some data points dropped in order to present single series for each country. This allows us to make readable visualizations that combine multiple countries and metrics. In choosing which data points to drop, we try to strike a balance between maintaining comparability over time and showing as long a time series as possible. As such, the exact approach varies somewhat across countries.
If you would like to see the original data with all available income and consumption data points shown separately, you can do so in our Poverty Data Explorer. You can also download this data in our complete dataset of the World Bank PIP data.
Reuse this work
- All data produced by third-party providers and made available by Our World in Data are subject to the license terms from the original providers. Our work would not be possible without the data providers we rely on, so we ask you to always cite them appropriately (see below). This is crucial to allow data providers to continue doing their work, enhancing, maintaining and updating valuable data.
- All data, visualizations, and code produced by Our World in Data are completely open access under the Creative Commons BY license. You have the permission to use, distribute, and reproduce these in any medium, provided the source and authors are credited.
Citations
How to cite this page
To cite this page overall, including any descriptions, FAQs or explanations of the data authored by Our World in Data, please use the following citation:
“Data Page: Prosperity gap”, part of the following publication: Joe Hasell, Max Roser, Esteban Ortiz-Ospina and Pablo Arriagada (2022) - “Poverty”. Data adapted from World Bank Poverty and Inequality Platform. Retrieved from https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/prosperity-gap [online resource]How to cite this data
In-line citationIf you have limited space (e.g. in data visualizations), you can use this abbreviated in-line citation:
World Bank Poverty and Inequality Platform (2024) – with major processing by Our World in DataFull citation
World Bank Poverty and Inequality Platform (2024) – with major processing by Our World in Data. “Prosperity gap – World Bank” [dataset]. World Bank Poverty and Inequality Platform, “World Bank Poverty and Inequality Platform (PIP) 20240627_2017, 20240627_2011” [original data]. Retrieved November 5, 2024 from https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/prosperity-gap