Reproducibility package for Poverty, Prosperity And Planet Report 2026

The Poverty, Prosperity, and Planet Report 2026: Jobs at the Center of Poverty Eradication assesses global progress toward ending extreme poverty and boosting shared prosperity on a livable planet. After three decades of historic gains, extreme poverty reduction has stalled. In 2026, an estimated 811 million people, 1 in 10 worldwide, are living on less than $3.00 a day, while nearly half of humanity is living on less than $8.30 a day. Poverty is increasingly concentrated in Sub-Saharan Africa and fragile and conflict-affected situations, where rapid population growth, insufficient economic growth, and exposure to various shocks make progress extremely difficult.
Through the deeply probing lens of poverty, prosperity, and planetary sustainability, the report finds that the number of economies with high inequality is falling. Yet, many people, including a growing share of the extreme poor, still live in highly unequal economies. Progress in closing the Global Prosperity Gap – an indicator that combines the tracking of both progress in average income and improvements in equity, has also slowed. Climate hazards, ecosystem degradation, food insecurity, and inadequate water and sanitation are threatening the gains in development, especially among those people and households with the fewest resources to withstand and recover from shocks. Ending extreme poverty would add relatively little to the cost or impacts of global emissions, demonstrating that poverty reduction and climate protection are not competing goals.
Placing jobs at the center of poverty eradication, the report provides new evidence on how employment and earnings shape household welfare. Labor is the main, and often the only, asset of the poor. Adults in poor and nonpoor households are about equally likely to be employed. Yet roughly one in three adults in poor households are not employed, and most of them are women. Those who work tend to earn less, work fewer hours, and support more dependents than their nonpoor counterparts. Both expanding employment opportunities and increasing earnings can reduce poverty, but their benefits differ across the distribution: higher earnings matter most for the poorest, while greater employment, particularly among women, benefits the near-poor most. Reinvigorating poverty reduction therefore requires both expanding access to jobs and improving the returns to the work that poor people already perform.