The BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in the Development Cooperation category has been granted in this eighth edition to Australian economist Martin Ravallion, a pioneer in the measurement of poverty using internationally applicable standards. In 1991, he was the first author of a paper that set one dollar a day as the extreme poverty line below which survival could not be assured. This threshold has been universally accepted, because “nothing below that is reasonable,” explained Ravallion himself after hearing of the prize. “If we are looking for a global standard we need to focus on the minimum levels of the poorest countries.”
