Working out what counts as poverty is also a tricky business. The World Bank’s new poverty figures were accompanied by a raising of its poverty line, which had been set at $1.25 a day, and is now at $1.90 a day. The raise came in response to new price data collected by the International Comparison Project (ICP), a research agency with a global army of window-shoppers. The data they collect is used to calculate the purchasing-power parity (PPP) of each country. PPP figures are used to adjust for the fact that a dollar’s worth of local currency will buy you different things in different countries. The lower the PPP level of a country, the easier it is to live in that country with the same amount of American dollars.