must blind themselves to the extra information in the second chart Unfortunately however, Mr Fischers admirable diagrams say nothing about poverty as such they contain no information about how many of China's people, or America's or any other country s, are poor. And they say nothing about whether growth in any particular country is To look more carefully at these questions one must peer through a cloud of statistical on) good for poor people living there(of course, growth raises incomes on average by definiti econometric chaff Measuring matters Much of the frequently acrimonious debate among economists about global poverty and inequality turns out to revolve around a single technical issue: is it better to measure consumption(and hence living standards)using data drawn from national accounts or data drawn from household surveys? The two sources ought to marry up. In fact they differ systematically and by a wide margin. Worse, growth in consumption, not merely levels of consumption, differs persistently according to which source is used. National-accounts data tend nearly always to give a much more optimistic view of trends in poverty than do household survey data Accordingly in a recent review of the literature by angus Deaton of Princeton University(Mr Deaton is perhaps the only economist at work in this area who is acknowledged by all sides both as authoritative and as having no ideological axe to grind) two sets of studies are contrasted The first draws mainly on national-accounts data, the second on household surveys Their results are at odds Work by Surjit Bhalla, by Xavier Sala-i-Martin, and by Francis Bourguignon and christian Morrisson shows rapid-indeed historically unprecedented-falls in poverty during the 1980s and 1990s, the new golden age of global capitalism. According to these papers the proportion of the world's people living on less than a dollar a day(inflation adjusted) has fallen so quickly that the decline has been enough to offset rising population in the developing countries. In other words the number of people in poverty has been falling not only as a share of the world's population but also, remarkably in absolute terms Mr Sala-j-Martin's calculations for instance, show that the proportion of the world's people living in acute poverty(on less than a dollar a day) fell from 17% in 1970 to 7% in 1998; the proportion living on less than $2 a day fell from 41% to 19%. the absolute headcount of global $1-a-day poverty fell, according to the same estimates, by 200m(see chart 3); and the count of $2-a-day poverty fell by 350m. Mr Bhalla, who finds the sharpest drop in poverty of these authors, wryly states that in 2000 when the United Nations(UN) announced its millennium Development Goal on poverty-to bring the number of people living on less than a dollar a day in 2015 down to half the level in 1990-the goal had already been achievedmust blind themselves to the extra information in the second chart. Unfortunately, however, Mr Fischer's admirable diagrams say nothing about poverty as such: they contain no information about how many of China's people, or America's or any other country's, are poor. And they say nothing about whether growth in any particular country is good for poor people living there (of course, growth raises incomes on average by definition). To look more carefully at these questions one must peer through a cloud of statistical and econometric chaff. Measuring matters Much of the frequently acrimonious debate among economists about global poverty and inequality turns out to revolve around a single technical issue: is it better to measure consumption (and hence living standards) using data drawn from national accounts or data drawn from household surveys? The two sources ought to marry up. In fact they differ systematically, and by a wide margin. Worse, growth in consumption, not merely levels of consumption, differs persistently according to which source is used. National-accounts data tend nearly always to give a much more optimistic view of trends in poverty than do household￾survey data. Accordingly, in a recent review of the literature* by Angus Deaton of Princeton University (Mr Deaton is perhaps the only economist at work in this area who is acknowledged by all sides both as authoritative and as having no ideological axe to grind) two sets of studies are contrasted. The first draws mainly on national-accounts data, the second on household surveys. Their results are at odds. Work by Surjit Bhalla, by Xavier Sala-i-Martin, and by Francis Bourguignon and Christian Morrisson shows rapid—indeed historically unprecedented—falls in poverty during the 1980s and 1990s, the new golden age of global capitalism. According to these papers, the proportion of the world's people living on less than a dollar a day (inflation adjusted) has fallen so quickly that the decline has been enough to offset rising population in the developing countries. In other words, the number of people in poverty has been falling not only as a share of the world's population but also, remarkably, in absolute terms. Mr Sala-i-Martin's calculations, for instance, show that the proportion of the world's people living in acute poverty (on less than a dollar a day) fell from 17% in 1970 to 7% in 1998; the proportion living on less than $2 a day fell from 41% to 19%. The absolute headcount of global $1-a-day poverty fell, according to the same estimates, by 200m (see chart 3); and the count of $2-a-day poverty fell by 350m. Mr Bhalla, who finds the sharpest drop in poverty of these authors, wryly states that in 2000 when the United Nations (UN) announced its Millennium Development Goal on poverty—to bring the number of people living on less than a dollar a day in 2015 down to half the level in 1990—the goal had already been achieved