Poverty Gap at $3.00 a Day

Poverty gap at $3.00 a day, 2021 PPP (%)·Higher is worse — rank 1 is worst affected·Published by World Bank Group

We hold 21 editions of this indicator, from 2002 to 2022 — 1,677 rows in total, and 73 countries in the newest.

21 reference years (2002–2022), covering 68 to 94 countries, from the World Bank’s own Poverty and Inequality Platform. The average shortfall below $3.00 a day across the WHOLE population, counting everyone above the line as a shortfall of zero. ⚠ IT ANSWERS A DIFFERENT QUESTION FROM THE HEADCOUNT, already on the site: the headcount says how many people are poor, the gap says how far below the line they fall. Two countries with the same headcount can have very different gaps, and the gap is the one that says what it would cost to close. ⚠ THE LINE MOVED IN 2025, from $2.15 at 2017 PPPs — the yardstick was re-based, so these figures are not comparable with published $1.90 or $2.15 figures from earlier reports. ⚠ THE COUNTRY SET CHANGES EVERY YEAR: each figure comes from whichever household survey that country happened to run, so a country missing from an edition did not escape poverty, it did not run a survey. ⚠ Read from PIP rather than the Bank’s indicator API, which rounds the same figure to one decimal — comparing 2022 row for row, 60 of 72 values differ and PIP carries more decimals in every one of them; Belgium is 0.01% at PIP and 0 at the API. ⚠ No rank is published, so none is stored; the POSITION on the statistics page is derived here by ordering the score and labelled as ours. Its deepest tie is five countries sharing exactly 0 — a genuine reading, not a rounding artefact, and the same case that let `poverty-headcount` opt in.