The paper provides a stock taking of our current knowledge on poverty in five Arab countries: Egypt, Jordan, Morocco and Tunisia, representing middle income countries; and Yemen, representing low income countries. It draws on the most recent results on poverty based on high quality data. For all countries, except for Jordan, it is noted that the cost of basic needs approach to the estimation of poverty lines is used including the estimation of the non-food component by Engel curves; and except for Jordan, such an approach gave rise to lower and upper poverty lines. The paper also notes that for almost all countries an attempt has been made to decompose observed changes in poverty over time using the conventional Datt-Ravallion method. On the basis of the review tha paper concludes that our knowledge base about poverty in the region is fairly decent, despite conflicting results and sometimes incomplete information.