Poverty Rate

The poverty rate is the ratio of the number of people (in a given age group) whose income falls below the poverty line; taken as half the median household income of the total population.

However, two countries with the same poverty rates may differ in terms of the relative income-level of the poor.

See definition: https://data.oecd.org/inequality/poverty-rate.htm

Also known as: poverty rate, income poverty.

No programming experience? With the Finance Toolkit MCP server, AI assistants such as Claude and ChatGPT can calculate the Poverty Rate for you. Just ask in plain English.

Calculate the Poverty Rate in Python

The Poverty Rate is available in the Economics module of the open-source Finance Toolkit. Install it with:

pip install financetoolkit -U

Then call get_poverty_rate as shown below.

from financetoolkit import Economics

economics = Economics(start_date='2012-01-01', end_date='2020-01-01')

economics.get_poverty_rate(countries='Portugal')

Which returns:

Parameters

get_poverty_rate accepts the following parameters:

• countries (list[str] | str | None, optional): The countries to include in the data. Defaults to None.
• rolling (int, optional): The rolling window size to use for smoothing the data (simple moving average). Defaults to None.
• trailing (int, optional): The trailing window size to use for summing the data over trailing periods (e.g. a trailing-4-quarter sum). Defaults to None.
• growth (bool, optional): Whether to return the growth data or the actual data.
• lag (int, optional): The number of periods to lag the data by.
• standardize (bool, optional): Whether to standardize (Z-Score) the result. When combined with growth=True, standardizes the growth values instead of the raw values. Defaults to False.
• rounding (int | None, optional): The number of decimals to round the results to. Defaults to None.

Related Jobs & Society

The Economics module page introduces the module, and the sidebar lists all of its functions.