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What Would it Cost to End Extreme Poverty?
Abstract
We study poverty minimization via direct transfers, framing this as a statistical learning problem while retaining the information constraints faced by real-world programs. Using nationally representative household consumption surveys from 34 countries that together account for 76% of the world's poor, we estimate that reducing the poverty rate to 1% (from a baseline of 13%) would cost $211 B nominal per year. This is 4.0 times the corresponding reduction in the aggregate poverty gap, but only 19% of the cost of universal basic income. Extrapolated globally, the results imply a cost of 0.28% of global GDP to (approximately) end extreme poverty.
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BibTeX
@misc{sahoo2026what,
title = {{What Would it Cost to End Extreme Poverty?}},
author = {Roshni Sahoo and Joshua Blumenstock and Paul Niehaus and Leo Selker and Stefan Wager},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = sep,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2609.02013},
eprint = {2609.02013},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.02013},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - What Would it Cost to End Extreme Poverty?
AU - Roshni Sahoo
AU - Joshua Blumenstock
AU - Paul Niehaus
AU - Leo Selker
AU - Stefan Wager
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/09/02
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2609.02013
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.02013
AB - We study poverty minimization via direct transfers, framing this as a statistical learning problem while retaining the information constraints faced by real-world programs. Using nationally representative household consumption surveys from 34 countries that together account for 76% of the world's poor, we estimate that reducing the poverty rate to 1% (from a baseline of 13%) would cost $211 B nominal per year. This is 4.0 times the corresponding reduction in the aggregate poverty gap, but only 19% of the cost of universal basic income. Extrapolated globally, the results imply a cost of 0.28% of global GDP to (approximately) end extreme poverty.
ER -