Poverty and Distribution: Twenty Years Ago and Now

This paper adopts the “Rip Van Winkle” stratagem, of asking what differences would be noticed, in the domain of poverty and distribution, by someone who fell asleep in 1987 (the year I published my paper on poverty in the IMF Staff Papers, and woke up only in 2007 (the year I visited the IMF to work on the present paper). I highlight, somewhat idiosyncratically, ten such differences under three broad headings: Facts and Empirics, Concepts and Theory, and Policies and Interventions.