Although the world witnessed an unprecedented pace of poverty reduction over the last decades, reducing the number of people living in extreme poverty by more than 700 million, approximately 1.2 billion people remained entrenched in destitution in 2010. In order to leverage developing country efforts and galvanize the international development community to exert concerted effort to end extreme poverty, the World Bank has established the twin goals of ending extreme poverty by 2030 and promoting shared prosperity by fostering income growth of the bottom 40 percent of the population in every country. Ending extreme poverty in just one generation is a formidable challenge by all accounts that requires a thorough understanding of the state of the poor.