Bangladesh - Poverty Assessment : Assessing a Decade of Progress in Reducing Poverty, 2000-2010

The purpose of this report is to document some of the aforementioned achievements over the 2000-2010 decade and to illustrate their collective impact on poverty in Bangladesh. Analysis is undertaken to identify which factors contributed to the rapid decline in poverty over time. The main limitation of this report is that the analysis is based on a limited number of data sources, which do not cover all aspects of the poverty reduction process. Nevertheless, to the extent possible, the analysis covers the key drivers of poverty reduction over what has been a remarkable decade for Bangladesh. The report is organized into four parts. Part one focuses on explaining poverty patterns observed over the 2000-2010 period, noting qualitative differences between the first and second half of the decade. The analysis in chapter one offers poverty projections based on survey data from this period. Chapter two describes some key characteristics of the poor. Using poverty decomposition methodology, part two identifies the main drivers of the poverty reduction experienced over the last decade. Chapter three shows that the two most important contributors to poverty reduction over the 2000-2010 periods were the growth of labor income and the declining dependency ratio. The remaining two chapters in this section focus on labor income and demographic factors to understand their respective linkages to poverty. The past few years have underscored the importance of global factors affecting country-level outcomes. However, the series of shocks that affected Bangladesh in 2007-2008 did not significantly slow down the speed of poverty reduction. In Chapters six and seven of part three, the report attempts to uncover some of the reasons underlying Bangladesh's resilience to these global shocks as well as the way in which poor households cope with seasonal shocks, which are a permanent feature of some rural parts of the country, namely Rangpur. Chapters eight and nine explore the role of safety nets and microfinance in helping households deal with shocks and poverty. In part four, chapter ten revisits one of the key findings of the World Bank poverty assessment of 2005 (published in 2008).