The acting director of the US Treasury department’s Asia Office says that the world just gained a few hundred million poor people:

In a little-noticed mid-summer announcement, the Asian Development Bank presented official survey results indicating China’s economy is smaller and poorer than established estimates say. The announcement cited the first authoritative measure of China’s size using purchasing power parity methods. The results tell us that when the World Bank announces its expected PPP data revisions later this year, China’s economy will turn out to be 40 per cent smaller than previously stated…

The number of people in China living below the World Bank’s dollar-a-day poverty line is 300m – three times larger than currently estimated… The ADB’s announcement also indicates that the number of dollar-a-day poor in India is closer to 800m than the current estimate of 400m.

Calculating the number of poor people is a difficult task, and disagreements about methodology abound, so I don’t take this FT piece as authoritative, but the issue warrants renewed attention.

I believe this ADB report is the one mentioned, though I cannot find any figures describing the number of people below the poverty line.