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Paper short abstract

Foregrounding the roles of standardization and commensuration, I trace the development of the international poverty line. I pay particular attention to how the poverty line has captured the popular development imagination and show how it shapes the goals and practices of development.

Paper long abstract

What does it mean for someone to be “impoverished” or to live "in poverty"? Since 1990, the answer has been surprisingly concrete: a person is impoverished if they live on less than a specific dollar figure a day This is determined by researchers at the World Bank, updated periodically, and applied uniformly across every country on earth. This figure, the International Poverty Line, is the primary global benchmark for monitoring extreme poverty, tracking progress toward the UN's Sustainable Development Goals, and guiding development aid. Rarely does a discussion of global poverty occur without it.

In this paper, I trace its development as a statistical object. I examine how researchers at the World Bank transformed poverty from a context-dependent phenomenon into a single, globally applicable threshold. I show that the poverty line functions simultaneously as a standard, coordinating action across heterogeneous actors and institutions, and as a commensurative device, collapsing the diverse experiences of poverty into one comparable figure. I continue by arguing that the poverty line has come to anchor a shared horizon of measurable, technical progress that shapes which interventions appear legible, which populations remain visible, and which forms of poverty fall outside the frame of global action entirely. The paper concludes that the poverty line does not merely measure a pre-existing social reality but actively constitutes it, with significant consequences for how development is practiced and what it can achieve.

Keywords: poverty, measurement, standardization, commensuration, development, World Bank, quantification