Poverty reduction has become a fundamental objective of development, and therefore a metric for assessing the effectiveness of various interventions. Economic growth can be a powerful instrument of income poverty reduction. This creates a need for meaningful ways of assessing the poverty impact...

Simple welfare indices such as mean income are ubiquitous but not distribution sensitive. In contrast, existing distribution sensitive welfare indices are rarely used, often because they are difficult to explain and/or lack intuitive units. This paper proposes a simple new distribution sensitive...

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...

The authors report new estimates of measures of absolute poverty for the developing world over 1981-2004. A clear trend decline in the percentage of people who are absolutely poor is evident, although with uneven progress across regions. They find more mixed success in reducing the total number...

Following the endorsement of the Millennium Development Goals, there is an increasing demand for methods to track poverty regularly. This paper develops an economically intuitive and inexpensive methodology to do so in the absence of regular, comparable data on household consumption. The minimum...

Recent literature and new data help determine plausible bounds to some key demographic differences between the poor and non-poor in the developing world. The author estimates that selective mortality-whereby poorer people tend to have higher death rates-accounts for 10-30 percent of the...

This study applies the cost-of-basic-needs approach to estimate food and total poverty lines for the Brazilian case. Using detailed data on expenditures from a 2017/18 household budget survey and caloric information from the Brazilian Table of Food Composition, calorie intake is assigned to more...