A/HRC/44/40 Societal differences 16. Others contend that the IPL does not take into account varying societal standards. While PPP rates in principle adjust for different prices of the same goods in various countries, they do not reflect differences in the basic goods required to escape poverty. A cell phone or transport costs may not be essential to work in a low-income country, but are imperative in a high-income one. Martin Ravallion, the principal architect of the Bank’s absolute “dollar-aday” line in 1990, has since argued that a truly global perspective on poverty actually requires a relative approach. He proposes a “weakly relative” line to account for the costs of social inclusion in richer countries.24 17. Reddy advocates for a context-specific approach with a fixed “set of reference capabilities (freedoms to achieve specific beings and doings) that a person must be deemed to be able to have in order to be non-poor.”25 Pricing this locally would do away with the need for a single global poverty line while allowing for international comparisons, and would eliminate the uncertainty raised by the PPPs. Gender inequalities 18. The prevailing method of measuring poverty is well-known to obscure gender differences because its estimate of per capita consumption assumes all resources are shared equally within the household, whereas research from China,26 Africa,27 and elsewhere shows widespread differences in resource allocation and consumption between women and men. 28 The implications are tremendous since nearly 100 million people lived a mere 10 cents above the poverty line in 2015. Even a slight systemic imbalance could mean the exclusion of millions of women living below the Bank’s line from global poverty figures. 19. Of course, this is a fundamental data collection issue that extends beyond the Bank. 29 To its credit, the Bank readily acknowledges that its figures ignore intra-household inequalities, 30 has recently highlighted this phenomenon, and is exploring innovative methods for understanding individual poverty.31 Overlooked groups 20. The success story also airbrushes out the situation of hundreds of millions who are missing or severely underrepresented in survey data. 32 They often come from groups disproportionately affected by poverty, including homeless people, pastoralists, migrant workers, refugees and displaced persons, people affected by armed conflict, people residing in households but not considered members (such as domestic workers), and those in informal settlements.33 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 6 Martin Ravallion, The Economics of Poverty (2015), p. 340; Shaohua Chen and Martin Ravallion, “Global Poverty Measurement when Relative Income Matters,” Journal of Public Economics, vol. 177 (2019), p. 104046. Lahoti and Reddy, pp. 15-16. Raül Santaeulàlia-Llopis and Yu Zheng, “Why Is Food Consumption Inequality Underestimated? A Story of Vices and Children,” Working Paper 969 (2017). Caitlin Brown, Martin Ravallion, and Dominic van de Walle, “Are poor individuals mainly found in poor households? Evidence using nutrition data for Africa,” World Bank Working Paper 8001, 9 March 2017, pp. 22-23. World Bank, Poverty and Shared Prosperity, pp. 125-49; Isis Gaddis and Dominique van de Walle, “Data gaps: The poor typical household surveys miss,” World Bank Blogs, 25 January 2016. Caroline Criado-Perez, Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed For Men (2019), ch. 13. Paul Romer, et al., “A Cover Note to the Report of the Commission on Global Poverty,” World Bank, 18 October 2016, p. 3. World Bank, Poverty and Shared Prosperity, p. 144. Cobham estimates that over 350 million people are “systematically excluded from surveys and census data.” The Uncounted, p. 157. Also, Anthony Atkinson, Measuring Poverty around the World (2019), p. 128. Atkinson, pp. 129-130; UN Environment Programme, “Putting sustainable pastoralism on the global agenda,” 23 June 2017; UN, “Refugees,” available at https://www.un.org/en/sections/issuesdepth/refugees/; International Organization for Migration, “Global Migration Trends,” available at https://www.iom.int/global-migration-trends.