Historical Poverty Estimates (World Bank And Maddison)

This dataset combines modern income distribution data from the World Bank's Poverty and Inequality Platform with historical GDP per capita data from the Maddison Project Database to generate long-run poverty estimates from 1820 to the present.

The methodology extrapolates income distributions backwards from 1990 (when detailed distributional data becomes available) to 1820, using actual historical GDP growth rates to adjust income levels while maintaining the shape of the income distribution.