If you type “poverty” into the BBC search engine, you see as Editor’s Choice a More or Less page on the dollar a day. It falsely claimed the World Bank had a “basket of essential goods” to judge poor people’s prices – until a complaint.

The word “essential” was removed as it “could be misunderstood” according to the editor. It remains in the Spanish translation and the podcast.

The page still makes the ridiculous claim that the World Bank use a “basket of food”. It wrongly states that Ravallion’s team collected prices of “goods” from “developing countries”. It mistakenly says “household surveys” and “census data” are used to judge how much you can buy in different countries, misinterpreting what Chen and Ravallion’s methodology papers say about those data sources.

Ravallion himself likes to say that his statistics are “real” values – meaning adjusted for inflation. But in reality World Bank economists have no global estimates for prices faced by poor people for any year from 1981 to 2015.

On 21 July 2015 the complainant commented on a blog post by the Director-General of the BBC. A few hours later, the Head of Editoral Complaints suddenly emailed him after a delay of several months, partly about his complaint of 27 May 2012.

The Director-General or whoever saw the comment seems not to have noticed the words “conflict of interest”.

The ECU made an error about the dollar a day in a published ruling of 2005, wrongly stating that it was influenced by exchange rates – meaning it was overvaluing the dollar a day by a factor of typically two or three in a poor country (to the extent that such comparisons make sense). Of course, if they made the error, programme makers were likely to. The entire Mike Wooldridge “A Dollar a Day” series, which I thought had some very good aspects, unfortunately converted real local currency to real dollars – as is evident from the web pages.

The comment to the Director-General is on a worse, and widespread, error made by More or Less on 10 March 2012 and elsewhere.

A smaller matter is that like the three initial complaints about More or Less in 2012, a complaint that More or Less in 2014 treated the International Comparison Programme’s purchasing-power-parity numbers in the way the ICP told people not to, was completely ignored by the BBC.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/aboutthebbc/entries/6d70efd6-c5ba-4e25-8eb2-69fb35fb5348?postId=122489091&initial_page_size=20#comment_122489091

Some background:

http://millenniumdeclaration.org