This note describes how poverty measures reported by the World Bank can be replicated using the Stata command povcalnet. Users can estimate poverty at any poverty line for the world, regions or sets of countries, by directly querying the World Bank’s database of household surveys. The command also retrieves inequality statistics provided by the database.

About one in four Latin Americans self-identify as Afro-descendants today. They comprise a highly heterogeneous population and are unevenly distributed across the region, but share a common history of displacement and exclusion.

The povcalnet commands allows Stata users to compute poverty and inequality indicators for more than 160 countries and regions in the World Bank’s database of household surveys. It has the same functionality as the PovcalNet website. PovcalNet is a computational tool that allows users to estimate poverty rates for regions, sets of countries or individual countries, over time and at any poverty line..