Open Source Poverty and Inequality Platform from the World Bank

Nishant Yonzan from the World Bank spoke to students and Pardee staff on Wednesday, February 15th about the Poverty and Inequality Platform. The platform contains comprehensive data collected by the World Bank about poverty at the national and subregional level, all of which is available to the public. During his talk, Yonzan demonstrated website features such as visualization of different poverty metrics like the Multidimensional Poverty Measure and side-by-side country comparison of poverty levels. Opening a public Do-file, Yonzan showed the audience how to directly access and analyze World Bank data using Stata. Yonzan confirmed that later this year the World Bank will publish more information on how to analyze the platform data with R and Python. Yonzan finished his talk by answering questions from the students about how the World Bank measures poverty, highlighting the recent poverty line adjustment from $1.90 to $2.15-a-day based on 2017 Purchasing Power Parities.

The Poverty and Inequality Platform can be accessed via pip.worldbank.org/home. The Do-file for easy analysis in Stata can be found here.