as countries reduce extreme absolute poverty concerns of social inclusion better represented by relative poverty lines become increasingly relevant anchoring the poverty line to median welfare makes the poverty line dependent on distributional parameters beyond the mean thus allowing for poverty lines that differ across countries with the same level of income per capita the paper derives and presents relative poverty headcount ratios from publicly available grouped data for countries an examination of the trends in absolute and relative poverty in brazil china and the united states uncovers commonalities that are not apparent if the analysis focuses on national poverty lines or different concepts across countries