Abstract
Based largely on work done by the World Bank, the world community focused on $1 per capita per day as the critical metric for poverty measurement, and the MDGs formulated halving of world poverty using this measure as a central goal. Continuation with this poverty metric is increasingly problematic due to conceptual challenges with this metric (involved in the derivation of the poverty line and the updating over time using different price comparison rounds), its increasing irrelevance for most countries, and the emergence of multidimensional and forward-looking poverty metrics. The talk will review these issues and propose a research and policy agenda for poverty measurement for the coming decades.
