characteristics, i.e. fundamental forces, against the alternative that there are poverty traps. Taking geographical variables as … fundamental characteristics, we find that we can reject fundamental forces in favor of a poverty trap model with high and low …

The paper provides new measures of global poverty that take seriously the idea of relative-income comparisons but also … acknowledge a deep identification problem when the latent norms defining poverty vary systematically across countries. Welfare … model of relative-income comparisons calibrated to data on national poverty lines. Both bounds indicate falling global …