development disproportionately raises the incomes of the poor and alleviates poverty. Using a broad cross-country sample, we … and poverty alleviation. We find that financial development reduces income inequality by disproportionately boosting the … poverty and income inequality. These results are robust to controlling for other country characteristics and potential reverse …

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 …