the variation is found to be very similar if one uses the a day poverty line for the countries with mass poverty to the right on the head count poverty incidence scale the narrow confidence band indicates that poverty elasticity is fully specified by the initial level of poverty or the initial level of income growth appears to be all that matters if the focus of analysis is absolute mass poverty on the other hand once one leaves the realm of mass poverty even though absolute poverty remains the main focus of analysis the confidence band widens rapidly indicating the distributional element taking increasing significance in the change in poverty