Poverty is an indicator of paramount importance for gauging the socioeconomic well-being of a population. Especially during or after a shock, poverty estimates are invaluable for assessing the severity of the impact and for identifying which parts of the population were most affected. The...

This paper studies future poverty, inequality, and shared prosperity outcomes using a panel data set with 150 countries over 1980-2014. The findings suggest that global extreme poverty will decrease in absolute and relative terms in the period 2015-2030. However, absolute poverty is likely to...

The proportion of Ugandan households living in poverty reduced by more than half between 1993 and 2013. Using household survey data, this paper analyzes nonmonetary dimensions of poverty in Uganda for levels and trends, to explore whether the observed reduction in monetary-based poverty are...

On October 15, 2015, World Bank Group President Jim Yong Kim announced the World Bank Group’s commitment to support the 78 poorest countries to implement a multi-topic household survey every three years between 2016 and 2030, for monitoring progress toward ending extreme poverty and boosting...

There is growing support for the idea that global income poverty should be assessed with a measure accounting for both own income and relative income. The trade-off that such a measure makes between own income and relative income is the key question. Non-paternalism requires that this trade-off...

This study compares the distributional impacts of the main tax and social spending programs in eight countries of the former Soviet Union (Armenia, Belarus, Georgia, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, the Russian Federation, Tajikistan, and Ukraine) by applying a state-of-the-art fiscal incidence analysis...

The author uses instrumental variable methods, and the decomposition of income into transitory and persistent components to distinguish underlying income inequality and changes in poverty from the effects attributable to measurement error or transitory shocks. He applies this methodology to...

Economic development necessarily changes the welfare of socioeconomic groups to various degrees, depending on differences in their social arrangements. The challenge for policymakers is to select the changes that will be most socially desirable. The author demonstrates the usefulness of...

The author uses new data from 50 developing countries and 101 intervals to examine the impact of economic growth on poverty and inequality. He finds that growth represents an important means for reducing poverty in the developing world. When economic growth is measured by survey mean income...

High inequality in Africa is something of a paradox: Africa should be a low-inequality continent according to the Kuznets hypothesis (because African countries are poor and agriculture-based), and also because land (the main asset) is widely shared. The author's hypothesis is that African...