The evidence is compelling that the poor in developing countries do typically share in the gains from rising aggregate affluence and in the losses from aggregate contraction. But how much do poor people share in growth? Do they gain more in some settings than others? Do some gain while others...

This paper shows how differences in aggregate human development outcomes over time and space can be additively decomposed into a pure economic-growth component, a component attributed to differences in the distribution of income, and components attributed to "non-income" factors and differences...

These days it seems that almost everyone in the development community is talking about "pro-poor growth." What exactly is it, and how can we measure it? Is ordinary economic growth always "pro-poor growth" or is that some special kind of growth? And if it is something special, what makes it...

The authors examine the distributional implications of selective compliance in sample surveys, whereby households with different incomes are not equally likely to participate. They discuss poverty and inequality measurement implications for monotonically decreasing and inverted-U...

The idea that developing countries face a trade-off between poverty and inequality has had considerable influence on thinking about development policy. The experience of developing countries in the 1990s does not, however, reveal any sign of a systematic trade-off between measures of absolute...

It has been argued that inequality should be of little concern in poor countries on the grounds that (1) absolute poverty in terms of consumption (or income) is the overriding issue in poor countries, and (2) the only thing that really matters to reducing absolute income poverty is the rate of...

While it is improbable that households with different incomes are equally likely to participate in sample surveys, the lack of data for nonrespondents has hindered efforts to correct for the bias in measures of poverty and inequality. The authors demonstrate how the latent income effect on...

In the last year or so, markedly different claims have been heard within the development community about just how much progress is being made against poverty and inequality in the current period of "globalization." Ravallion provides a nontechnical overview of the conceptual and methodological...

Comparing changes in inequality with initial levels, using new data, the author finds that within-country inequality in income or per capita consumption is converging toward medium levels--a Gini index around 40 percent. The finding is robust to allow for serially independent measurement error...

Drawing on a compilation of data from household surveys representing 130 countries, many over a period of 25 years, this paper reviews the evidence on levels and recent trends in global poverty and income inequality. It documents the negative correlations between both poverty and inequality...