What Does Poverty Mean in the World?

Artist Stefen Chow and economist Lin Hui-Yi wanted to visually represent what poverty means in different parts of the world and created a project called The Poverty Line, which shows “visual portrayal of items found in that country that could be bought by a person living at the poverty line.”

For developed countries, where there is relatively updated household consumption data, we focus on the average daily amount that a person at the poverty line would spend on food. For developing countries, we use the average daily amount that a person at the poverty line earns/spends. We have faced challenges in trying to develop a calculation method that makes sense across different countries’ systems, and this is our way of bringing it together.