A Global Profile of Work and Poverty: Two Decades of Evidence

Maurizio Bussolo, Christoph Lakner and Minh Cong Nguyen

No 11488, Policy Research Working Paper Series from The World Bank

Abstract: This paper constructs a new global database that links harmonized labor-market information from household surveys to the welfare distributions underlying the global poverty estimates. Covering 150 economies and 96 percent of the world’s population between 2003 and 2024, the database places individuals in the global welfare distribution while recording their education, employment status, and sector of work. This linkage allows comparing labor market outcomes between poor and non-poor populations within and across countries over two decades. Decomposing growth in welfare per person between 2003 and 2024 into welfare per worker, the employment rate, and the working-age share shows that welfare per worker accounts for all the welfare growth in the bottom three quintiles of the global distribution, where the contribution of employment is negative. Relative to the nonpoor, poor workers are less educated, substantially more likely to be self-employed, and far more concentrated in agriculture, while employment rates are broadly similar and poor workers work somewhat fewer hours. At the $3.00 poverty line, 61 percent of poor workers have only primary education or less, 79 percent are self-employed, and 66 percent work in agriculture, compared with 25 percent, 35 percent, and 20 percent among the nonpoor. Counterfactual simulations suggest that narrowing gaps in education, employment type, and sector would reduce poverty substantially, and at the $3.00 line by more than raising employment. At the higher $8.30 line, raising employment matters as much, and nearly all of its effect comes from women’s employment.

Date: 2026-10-21
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