The Invisible Continent. Counting the Missing Poor in Developing Countries

Mathieu Lefebvre, Harun Onder, Pierre Pestieau, Gregory Ponthiere and Emi Suzuki

No 1822, GLO Discussion Paper Series from Global Labor Organization (GLO)

Abstract: Because the poor face higher mortality, they are under-represented in the samples used to measure poverty. This paper quantifies this missing poor bias across 92 developing and least developed countries by comparing observed headcount poverty rates with counterfactual rates that would prevail if all individuals enjoyed the survival conditions of the top income class. Using income distributions and life expectancy by wealth quintile, we find the bias to be substantial and highly heterogeneous, from negligible in parts of Central Asia to 15 percentage points in Bolivia and 36 in Bhutan. Aggregated, the correction reveals an invisible continent of more than 116 million uncounted poor, large enough to reverse international poverty rankings. Instrumenting health system coverage with malaria ecology, we then show that universal health coverage causally reduces both the bias and the steepness of the income-mortality gradient through which it arises. A ten point gain in coverage lowers the bias by about one percentage point, three times the OLS estimate. Progress toward universal health coverage therefore yields a second dividend, correcting a measurement distortion concentrated where deprivation is deepest.

Keywords: poverty; measurement; mortality; missing poor bias (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I32 J11 J17 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hea
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/344029/1/GLO-DP-1822.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:zbw:glodps:1822

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in GLO Discussion Paper Series from Global Labor Organization (GLO) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics ().