Pakistan's first household survey since 2019 pushed a regional poverty rate from 11.8 to 14.4 per cent

The World Bank now says 847 million people were living in extreme poverty in 2024. Six months earlier it said 839 million. The revision, published on 26 March 2026 in the Bank's quarterly global poverty update, did not follow any fresh collapse in the world economy. It followed the arrival of survey data, 28 country-years of it, and above all the arrival of one country that had been missing for years.

The Bank singled out Pakistan. Its inclusion, the update says, secured coverage for the region the Bank labels the Middle East, North Africa, Afghanistan and Pakistan. The regional extreme poverty rate for that group moved from 11.8 per cent in the September 2025 vintage to 14.4 per cent in the March 2026 vintage, an increase of roughly 21 million people counted as poor. The Bank notes it is the only region where the extreme poverty rate has been rising in recent years. The global rate for 2024 shifted far less, from 10.3 to 10.4 per cent, because the regional jump is partly offset elsewhere. The nowcast for 2026 is 10.0 per cent.

None of those 21 million people became poor in March 2026. Pakistan's Bureau of Statistics ran the fieldwork for its Household Integrated Economic Survey from September 2024 to June 2025, and its technical committee reviewed the results on 28 November 2025. The bureau's own key indicators put average monthly household income at 82,179 rupees and average monthly consumption at 79,150 rupees for that round. The previous provincial-level round was 2018-19. That is a gap of about six years in the statistical record of a country of well over 200 million people, and for most of that gap the global poverty series was carrying an estimate rather than a measurement.

This is the third large revision to the same series in under two years, and only one of them was about the world changing. On 5 June 2025 the Bank moved its international poverty line from 2.15 to 3.00 US dollars a day in 2021 purchasing power parities, with the lower-middle line going from 3.65 to 4.20 and the upper-middle line from 6.85 to 8.30. That single definitional change lifted the 2022 extreme poverty rate from 9.0 to 10.5 per cent and the headcount from 713 million to 838 million, an addition of 125 million people. On 30 September 2025 a further update, driven largely by new Nigerian data that lifted the sub-Saharan African rate from 45.1 to 46.0 per cent, added about 22 million more. The database now holds more than 2,500 survey-year observations from 172 countries.

The sources do not agree, and the disagreement is instructive. The United Nations statistical division's Sustainable Development Goals report, published on 14 July 2025, put extreme poverty at 9.9 per cent and about 808 million people for 2025. The Bank's own September 2025 nowcast for the same year was 10.1 per cent. Our World in Data, summarising the series, describes roughly 800 million people in extreme poverty in 2025 against 2.31 billion in 1990, and about 760 million projected for 2030. These are not competing claims about reality so much as different vintages of the same underlying platform, published on different days.

A sharper tension runs through Pakistan itself. The World Bank's own Pakistan country page, last updated on 19 November 2025, records the national poverty rate falling from 25.3 per cent in the 2024 financial year to 22.5 per cent in 2025, which it attributes to lower food inflation and stronger growth, while also noting that poverty reduction rapid between 2000 and the mid-2010s has stalled. A national line and an international line, applied to the same country in the same months, are pointing in opposite directions.

What the March 2026 release changed, then, is not the world. It changed the resolution of the picture. What remains unknown is how much of the rest of the map is similarly out of focus: how many of the 172 countries in the platform are running on survey data more than five years old, whether the 14.4 per cent regional figure survives contact with the next round of Afghan and Middle Eastern surveys, and whether the international line at 3.00 dollars and Pakistan's national line can be reconciled at all, or whether they are simply measuring two different things and always were.