This one (linked from yours) is even more directly addressing the trickery involved:
http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2014/08/exposing-gr...
http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2014/08/exposing-gr...
So just a bit playing with the data seems to imply that the claim of a strong reduction in global extreme poverty seems to be warranted. (This is certainly not a sciency study...)
The numbers then does show increasing absolute numbers of poor until 1999, and then a decline getting to slightly below 1981 levels in 2011. As percentage of the worlds population it looks a bit better.
[1] This version uses 205 PPP: http://iresearch.worldbank.org/PovcalNetPPP2005/index.htm?0
Why not use some stuff like infant mortality or literacy or deaths from starvation or deaths from communicable disease? You know, stuff that actually indicates whether someone is impoverished or not.
No, because the poverty lines are all expressed in inflation-adjusted dollars.
Why not use some stuff like infant mortality or literacy or deaths from starvation or deaths from communicable disease? You know, stuff that actually indicates whether someone is impoverished or not.
Those measures are all improving dramatically too.
I don't understand this, and they don't explain. What is PPP, if not "real terms"? Plus I hate it when somebody makes a claim like this without actually showing the numbers, or creating a graph - it makes the claim less plausible than what they are complaining about.
Otherwise the article has valid points, mostly about watering down goals, and the lack of real progress in poverty reduction.
Note also that the OP is about the poverty rate, not about poverty being in decline, which is in fact increasing all too quickly.
Clicking the first two inflation calculators I found on Google and assuming their numbers are right (they both gave the same result), it does seem that if they had inflation adjusted the number using US rates, the original USD 1.02 should have been USD 1.37 by 1993.
EDIT: It's of course important to keep in mind that inflation rates are different across the world, and presumably the world bank at least will insist that they accounted for real term price changes for the relevant goods, so I still don't know how relevant this point in the article actually is.