Martin Ravallion, an Australian economist who devoted his career to fighting poverty, occasionally found his reputation preceded him to remote parts of the world.

In 2016 the Dutch publication De Correspondent described a 2005 field trip Ravillion took to the southern Chinese province of Guizhou – one of the country’s poorest – where he asked the county statistician what approach he used to calculate how many people in the region were poor.

“Martin’s method,” the official reportedly replied. Ravallion wondered if the number-cruncher knew he was lunching with the creator of the method of measuring poverty adopted around the world.

“No, you’re putting me on!” the official responded. “You can’t be the Martin.”

Ravallion, who died of prostate cancer in Washington DC on Christmas Eve, aged 70, was that Martin.

Gaurav Datt, an economist at Monash University, says Ravallion’s career “deserves better celebration of an Australian who’s done some important things in the world”.

Ravillion supervised Datt’s PhD at the Australian National University in 1985, and later worked with him at the World Bank.

“[Ravallion] just had this relentless energy, completely unstoppable,” Datt says. “He was going gangbusters right to the end, and given the chance he would have kept going.”

Other former colleagues at the World Bank have paid tribute to Ravallion as “one of the most influential figures” in the study of poverty and inequality. Those at the Center for Global Development, where Ravallion was a non-resident fellow, lauded an “exceptional poverty economist” with more than 370 publications cited at least 10 times. Google Scholar attributes to him more than 83,000 citations.

Ravallion was perhaps best known for his work in identifying methods to measure poverty that enabled cross-nation comparisons. This work nudged the World Bank to set a poverty marker, initially at US$1 a day, in 1990. With a yardstick in place, the next job was to identify policies that best cut the numbers below that line.

“Even though we made statements about poor people, we never thought about asking them what they were doing,” says Shanta Devarajan, who, like Ravallion, was a former acting chief economist at the World Bank. Both followed retirement from the development bank with teaching roles as professors at Georgetown University in DC.

“Martin took on what was traditionally thought of as a very soft, touchy-feely subject, like poverty,” Devarajan says. “He showed it can be approached rigorously, empirically and with sensitivity. It’s that combination that made his contribution so important.”

‘An intellectual superstar’

Ravallion knew something of poverty himself, growing up on the northern beaches of Sydney with his single mother. Friends say he never made much of his straitened childhood although it very likely shaped his outlook.

“The idea that we care about the poorest has deep roots in moral philosophy, social policy and thinking about development goals,” Ravallion told World Bank bloggers in 2019.

Patricia Apps, an economics professor at the University of Sydney, met Ravallion when he was studying architecture as an undergraduate in the 1980s. Then a lecturer, Apps was influential in steering the outstanding student to economics.

“He had such an interest in learning, knowing how the world worked,” Apps says.

Ravallion was so able to distill complex ideas she invited him to give lectures before he headed off to the London School of Economics for a PhD.

Apps would later stay in DC with Ravallion and his partner, Dominique van de Walle, an economist he met at LSE who also went on to serve as a senior World Bank economist with a focus on the poor.

“[Ravallion] really saw what the problems were, could write them up, and he could also present them extremely well,” Apps says. “He focused on poverty across countries and, of course, the great inequality that exists across countries. So his work is extremely important.”

Vijayendra Rao, a lead economist in the World Bank’s Development Research Group, reported to Ravallion, sharing an adjacent office, for a decade. He recalls a boss “always on the side of his staff”, who would walk in to seek an opinion on his latest paper and happily brainstorm others’ work.

People “would sometimes joke that he writes more than we read”, Rao says.

While Ravallion helped make China’s rapid poverty reduction better known to the world, it was his knowledge and “great affection” for India that stood out.

“He had read all these obscure papers that I thought only I had read,” Rao says. “[Ravallion] knew as much about the intellectual life of India, particularly around issues of poverty and poverty management, as any Indian economist would have.”

Justin Sandefur, a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development, says Ravallion “was really agnostic about the politics”.

“He would have said, ‘you know, an argument about nationalisation or privatisation of state enterprises, that’s beyond my remit’,” Sandefur says. “What I’m here to tell you is what impact it’s having on poverty.”

Ravallion was “probably not a household name” in Australia or elsewhere, but within the World Bank, with its thousands of economists, he was “an intellectual superstar” whose influence lives on, Sandefur says.

When the institution set its mission to a “world free of poverty”, it was “Martin’s definition and Martin’s measure”, Sandefur says.