Reproducibility package for A Global Profile Of Work And Poverty: Two Decades Of Evidence

We construct 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 unique linkage allows us to compare labormarket outcomes between poor and non-poor populations within and across countries over two decades. Relative to the non-poor, poor workers are less educated, substantially more likely to be self-employed, and far more concentrated in agriculture, while employment rates are broadly similar. 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 non-poor. Counterfactual simulations suggest that narrowing gaps in education, employment type, and sector would reduce poverty substantially, often by more than comparable increases in employment. Decomposing growth in welfare per person between 2003 and 2024 into the returns of labor, the employment rate, and the working-age share, shows that the returns to labor explain all of the observed poverty reduction.