Share of population below 50% of median income or consumption
What you should know about this indicator
- This is a measure of relative poverty – it captures the share of people whose income is low by the standards typical in their own country.
- 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.
Related research and writing
Frequently Asked Questions
How comparable is the World Bank data on household incomes across time or between countries?
Because there is no global survey of incomes, researchers need to rely on available national surveys. Such surveys are designed with cross-country comparability in mind, but because the surveys reflect the circumstances and priorities of individual countries at the time of the survey, there are some important differences. In collating this survey data the World Bank takes steps to harmonize it where possible, but comparability issues remain.
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
Measures of relative poverty are not directly available in the World Bank PIP data. To calculate this metric we take the median income or consumption for the country and year, calculate a relative poverty line – in this case {povline} of the median – and then run a specific query on the PIP API to return the share of population below that line.
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: Share of population below 50% of median income or consumption”, 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/relative-poverty-share-of-people-below-50-of-the-median [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 Data
Full citation
World Bank Poverty and Inequality Platform (2024) – with major processing by Our World in Data. “Share of population below 50% of median income or consumption – World Bank” [dataset]. World Bank Poverty and Inequality Platform, “World Bank Poverty and Inequality Platform (PIP) 20240627_2017, 20240627_2011” [original data]. Retrieved October 30, 2024 from https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/relative-poverty-share-of-people-below-50-of-the-median