Poverty Mobility in Developing Countries: Stylized Facts, Data Constraints, and Subnational Illustrations

A considerable degree of poverty mobility can occur in countries even though overall, aggregate, poverty remains unchanged. This paper reviews studies on poverty mobility in developing countries, using concepts organized by four choices: the unit of analysis, the time frame, the reference distribution, and the data structure. Ten stylized facts are drawn from the literature. An illustrative application asks whether similar patterns appear in the dynamics of places, using the Subnational Poverty and Inequality Database (SPID) for 1,949 regions in 135 economies over 2000–2024. We find that at the $4.20-a-day line, movement across fixed poverty bands points consistently towards lower poverty. Persistent high poverty is geographically concentrated in mostly African economies, and disproportionately in fragile ones, in which measurement is also considerably more problematic. Income-group upgrades go together with broader and faster regional poverty reduction. Movements in monetary and multidimensional dynamics are generally consistent. An apparent convergence pattern among initially poorer regions is sensitive to illustrative measurement-error assumptions. We further highlight data limitations and future research directions.