Many critical policy decisions rely on data about the geographic distribution of wealth and poverty, yet only half of all countries have access to adequate data on poverty. This paper creates a complete and publicly available set of microestimates of the distribution of relative poverty and wealth across all 135 low- and middle-income countries. We provide extensive evidence of the accuracy and validity of the estimates and also provide confidence intervals for each microestimate to facilitate responsible downstream use. These methods and maps provide a set of tools to study economic development and growth, guide interventions, monitor and evaluate policies, and track the elimination of poverty worldwide.
The main datasets of population wealth estimates produced in this study are publicly available at <https://data.humdata.org/dataset/relative-wealth-index> ([27][1]). The data used to construct these estimates are available from public online repositories, publicly available upon registration at <https://www.dhsprogram.com/> ([35][2]) and not publicly available because of restrictions by the data provider. A detailed table of data sources and availability is provided in [ SI Appendix , Table S2][3]. The code used for these analyses is publicly available online at <https://github.com/g-chi/global-poverty>. Our repository excludes the pretrained CNN used to extract features from satellite imagery, which is considered propriety information of Facebook. This CNN is based on code available at <https://github.com/facebookresearch/WSL-Images> ([41][4]), which should produce similar results.