This paper reviews Uzbekistan’s Interim Welfare Improvement Strategy Paper (I-WISP). I-WISP defines the main directions and measures aimed at improving living standards and reducing poverty among the population of Uzbekistan for 2005–10. The strategy is designed to further expand...

Sweden represents an archetypal welfare state economy, with extensive government safety nets. Some scholars have attributed a decline in its per capita income ranking since 1970 to "eurosclerosis" or sluggish growth caused by distortionary policies. This paper argues rather, that the permanent...

This Selected Issues paper reviews the extent to which growth in Ethiopia has translated into higher living standards. A key feature of the economic strategy has been an explicit commitment to poverty reduction and structural transformation. This is underpinned by the vision of a...

This Joint Staff Advisory Note (JSAN) reviews the Second Accelerated Development and Poverty Reduction Strategy (SDARP) of Niger, which provides a framework for implementing the government’s growth and poverty reduction agenda. It provides a thorough poverty diagnosis, sectoral plans,...

This paper discusses Second National Poverty Reduction Strategy II (NPRS-II) (2012–2016) for Democratic Republic of São Tomé and Príncipe. A comparison of the results of the 2000 and 2010 poverty profile, based on the average income method, shows that there was progress in reducing poverty,...

The paper examines empirically the question of whether more unequal societies spend more on income redistribution than their more egalitarian counterparts. Theoretical arguments on this issue are inconclusive. The political economy literature suggests that redistributive spending is higher in...

Throughout the world, the great popularity of programs to protect those who may fall into poverty stands in contrast with the weakness of policies aimed at helping individuals who are already poor to overcome long-term poverty. In the paper, an OLG model with persistent poverty and limited...

How does fiscal policy fare in improving the underlying income distribution in Central America? We integrate the data from a number of existing tax and public expenditure studies for the countries in the region and find that the distributional effect of taxation is regressive but small. In...

This paper uses the Shapley Value decomposition technique to assess the factors behind the rise of inequality in China. It finds that, in many ways, inequality may have been an inevitable by-product of China’s investment and export-led growth model. Between Chinese households, we find that the...

The paper examines Senegal’s growth performance from the perspective of its povertyreducing and distributional characteristics, and discusses policies that might help make growth more inclusive. The main findings are that poverty has fallen in the last two decades, but poverty reduction has...