In 2013, the World Bank adopted its twin goals – (1) Reduce global extreme poverty to 3 percent by 2030; (2) promote shared prosperity defined as the income growth of the poorest 40 percent of the population within every country. We simulate poverty headcount ratios under different assumptions about the growth in average incomes as well as the distributional effects of a given growth rate. In the simulations, growth is pro-poor if the poorest 40 percent is growing faster than the rest of the population, thus illustrating the connections between the World Bank's twin goals. The simulations illustrate why pro-poor growth is important for the goal of ending extreme poverty.

The first set of simulations were created for the World Bank Policy Research Report A Measured Approach to Ending Poverty and Boosting Shared Prosperity: Concepts, Data, and the Twin Goals, and published as: Lakner, Negre and Prydz (2014), Twinning the goals: how can promoting shared prosperity help to reduce global poverty?, World Bank Policy Research Working Paper No. 7106. The main results are also presented in this blog post, Poverty will only end by 2030 if growth is shared, and have been cited in this Economist article.