The Economic Lives of the Poor.

I n what turned out to be a rhetorical master-move, the 1990 World Development Report from the World Bank defined the “extremely poor” people of the world as those who are currently living on no more than $1 per day per person, measured at the 1985 purchasing power parity (PPP) exchange rate. In 1993, the poverty line was updated to $1.08 per person per day at the 1993 PPP exchange rate, which is the line we use in this paper. Poverty lines have always existed—indeed $1 per day was chosen in part because of its proximity to the poverty lines used by many poor countries. However the $1-a-day poverty line has come to dominate the conversations about poverty to a remarkable extent. But how actually does one live on less than $1 per day? This essay is about the economic lives of the extremely poor: the choices they face, the constraints they grapple with, and the challenges they meet. The available evidence on the economic lives of the extremely poor is incomplete in many important ways. However, a number of recent data sets and a body of new research have added a lot to what we know about their lives, and taken together there is enough to start building an image of the way the extremely poor live their lives. Our discussion of the economic lives of the extremely poor builds on household surveys conducted in 13 countries listed in Table 1: Cote d’Ivoire, Guatemala, India, Indonesia, Mexico, Nicaragua, Pakistan, Panama, Papua New Guinea, Peru, South Africa, Tanzania, and Timor Leste (East Timor). We mainly use the Living