news · September 21, 2026
Ending extreme poverty would cost 0.28% of global GDP — NBER working paper built on World Poverty Clock data
By World Data Lab — Research
New NBER research estimates that direct transfers could lift nearly everyone above the $2.15-a-day line for about $211 billion a year — 19% of the cost of universal basic income — using poverty data from World Data Lab's World Poverty Clock.
A new working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), What Would it Cost to End Extreme Poverty?, asks: what would it actually cost to transfer enough income to every household to lift nearly everyone above the $2.15-a-day extreme poverty line? The paper by Roshni Sahoo, Joshua Blumenstock, Paul Niehaus, Leo Selker and Stefan Wager, researchers affiliated with Stanford, UC Berkeley and UC San Diego was released in December 2025 and revised in September 2026.
0.28%
of global GDP to (approximately) end extreme poverty
$211B
nominal per year to cut the poverty rate to 1% across 34 study countries
19%
of the cost of an equivalent universal basic income
What the paper finds
The authors frame poverty minimisation via direct transfers as a statistical learning problem, using nationally representative household consumption surveys from 34 countries that together account for 76% of the world's poor. They estimate that reducing the poverty rate from 13% to 1% would cost $211 billion nominal per year about 4 times the corresponding reduction in the aggregate poverty gap, but only 19% of the cost of a universal basic income set at the same line. Extrapolated globally, the results imply a cost of roughly 0.28% of global GDP to (approximately) end extreme poverty.
Built on World Poverty Clock data
The study takes its country-level poverty picture from World Data Lab's World Poverty Clock, citing it for poverty rates, country inclusion and exclusion decisions, and country-level poverty headcount data.
The full working paper is available on the NBER website: What Would it Cost to End Extreme Poverty? (NBER Working Paper 34583).
