This year’s global poverty update from the World Bank is a minor one. Until reference year 2008, the World Bank published new poverty estimates every three years, and between 2010 and 2013 we released new numbers every year. From now on, we plan to publish estimates of global poverty for a new reference year every other year, coinciding with the publication of the biennial Poverty and Shared Prosperity reports, in the autumn of even years.

This management decision reflects a recognition that changes in global and regional poverty estimates from one year to the next are typically small, particularly in relation to the likely uncertainties involved in these estimates. Furthermore, many developing countries do not field household surveys every year. For these countries, changes from one year to the next are often based on extrapolation methods, which may give rise to additional estimation errors... — blog.wb.org/blogs