Despite the increasing awareness concerning the importance of distinguishing chronic and transient poverty for policy making, cross-country comparative studies of poverty dynamics in developing countries are virtually non-existent. The small, though increasing, number of existing studies makes...

How has poverty changed during the 1997-99 period, when the Peruvian economic performance deteriorated seriously under the negative impact of the international financial crisis? The answer to this question has traditionally relied on cross-section comparisons of poverty indicators. In this paper...

This paper gives a selected review of some of the work on poverty mobility, largely based on recent research. The literature is vast and many interesting suggestive findings have emerged. Most evidence points to the importance of household endowments, in terms of education or assets, as well as...

We explore how to measure poverty over time, by focusing on trajectories of poverty rather than poverty at a particular point in time. We consider welfare outcomes over a period in time, consisting of a number of spells. We offer a characterization of desirable properties for measuring poverty...

Because of the lack of panel data there have been few studies on poverty dynamics in developing countries. Furthermore, because of methodological differences, it is difficult to draw general conclusions from them. This paper analyses a large sample of Peruvian and Madagascan urban households...

We propose a new methodology for comparing poverty over multiple periods across time and space that does not arbitrarily aggregate income over various years or rely on arbitrarily specified poverty lines or poverty indices. Following Duclos et al. (2006a), we use the multivariate stochastic...

This paper investigates recent advances in our understanding of the global distribution of income, and produces the first estimates of global inequality that take into account data on the incomes of the top one percent within countries.  We discuss conceptual and methodological issues -...

This paper uses sequential stochastic dominance procedures to compare the joint distribution of health and income across space and time. It is the first application of which we are aware of methods to compare multidimensional distributions of income and health using procedures that are robust to...

The aim of this article is to analyse in depth the interactions of growth and poverty in Syria, which undertook reforms to reduce the government's involvement in the economy. During the 1996–2004 period, growth was pro-poor in ‘weak absolute’ terms but not in either relative or ‘strong...

This paper introduces a new methodology to target direct transfers against poverty. Our method is based on estimation methods that focus on the poor. Using data from Tunisia, we estimate ‘focused’ transfer schemes that highly improve anti-poverty targeting performances. Post-transfer poverty...