earlier versions of this paper received comments from anthony atkinson francois bourguignon matthew hammill johannes jutting marco mira dercole and martin ravallion for which the authors are grateful the authors are indebted to the world bank for the online availability of the distributional data in the povcalnet database special thanks go to shaohua chen for providing some of the underlying data directly to the authors the decade of the s was the first to witness unconditional convergence across countries in a generation as poor countries led by china and india grew faster than the advanced economies of the oecd rapid growth in the developing world has reduced extreme poverty dramatically there are million fewer extremely poor people in the world now than in the world is on track to achieving the goal of halving the number of people living on a dollar a day as it set out to do in the millennium declaration