The two sources of data on aggregate economic welfare, household surveys and national accounts, can yield different results. How large is this divergence? How is it changing over time? And how does it vary by region?

The poor urbanize faster than the population as a whole. But experience across countries suggests that a majority of the poor will still live in rural areas long after most people in the developing world live in urban areas

In the decollectivization of agriculture in Vienam, local allocation of land use rights reduced overall inequality, thanks to initial conditions at the time of reform and actions by the center to curtail the power of local elites

A lot can be learned about the impact of an antipoverty program by studying income replacement for those observed to leave the program after its retrenchment. A Bank-supported workfare program in Argentina is found to have a sizeable impact on participants' incomes

New tools allow one to study the incidence of economic growth by initial level of income, and to measure the rate of pro-poor growth in an economy. An application is provided using data for China in the 1990s