In his eloquently written and deeply researched new book The Great Escape Health, Wealth, and the Origins of Inequality, Princeton University s Angus Deaton urges caution. For those interested in world poverty, it is unquestionably the most important book on development assistance to appear in a long time.

In addition, there are several ways to calculate GDP, and they can produce wildly different results. Jerven mentions three the World Development Indicators, published by the World Bank (by far the most commonly used dataset) the Penn World Table, released by the University of Pennsylvania and the Maddison Project at the University of Groningen, which is based on work by the late economist Angus Maddison.