revisits the issues using a new series of consumption-based poverty measures spanning 50 years, and including a 15-year period … after economic reforms began in earnest in the early 1990s. Growth has tended to reduce poverty, including in the post …-reform period. There is no robust evidence that the responsiveness of poverty to growth has increased, or decreased, since the …

Brazil, China and India have seen falling poverty in their reform periods, but to varying degrees and for different … reasons. History left China with favorable initial conditions for rapid poverty reduction through market-led economic growth … off, prior inequalities in various dimensions handicapped poverty reduction in both Brazil and India. Brazil's recent …

The paper presents a major overhaul to the World Bank's past estimates of global poverty, incorporating new and better … data. Extreme poverty-as judged by what "poverty" means in the world's poorest countries-is found to be more pervasive than … we thought. Yet the data also provide robust evidence of continually declining poverty incidence and depth since the …

The authors report new estimates of measures of absolute poverty for the developing world over 1981-2004. A clear trend … no sustained progress in reducing the number of poor, with rising poverty counts in some regions, notably Sub …-Saharan Africa. There are encouraging signs of progress in reducing the incidence of poverty in all regions after 2000, although it …

The authors provide new evidence on the extent to which absolute poverty has urbanized in the developing world, and the … role that population urbanization has played in overall poverty reduction. They find that one-quarter of the world … helped reduce absolute poverty in the aggregate but did little for urban poverty. Over 1993-2002, the count of the "$1 a day …

death rates-accounts for 10-30 percent of the developing world's trend rate of "$1 a day" poverty reduction in the 1990s … rates-has had a more than offsetting poverty-increasing effect. The net impact of differential natural population growth … represents 10-50 percent of the trend rate of poverty reduction. …

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 economic growth. The author takes (1) as given but questions (2 …, influences the extent of poverty today and the prospects for rapid poverty reduction in the future …

Prevailing measures of relative poverty put an implausibly high weight on relative deprivation, such that measured … poverty does not fall when all incomes grow at the same rate. This stems from the (implicit) assumption in past measures that … roles of certain private expenditures in poor settings and with data on national poverty lines. The authors propose a new …

The 'developing world's middle class' is defined here as those who are not poor when judged by the median poverty line …-fifths came from Asia, and half from China. Most of the new entrants remained fairly close to poverty, with incomes now bunched up …