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 … just above $2 a day. The vulnerability of this new middle class to aggregate economic contractions is evident in the fact …

Growth is pro-poor if the poverty measure of interest falls. According to this definition there are three potential … sources of pro-poor growth: (1) a high rate of growth of average incomes; (2) a high sensitivity of poverty to growth in … average incomes; and (3) a poverty-reducing pattern of growth in relative incomes. The author empirically decomposes changes …

The authors show how subjective poverty lines can be derived using simple qualitative assessments of perceived … was adequate for their family's needs. The author's approach, by identifying the subjective poverty line without the usual …. The implied subjective poverty lines are robust to alternative methods of dealing with other components of consumption …

-poor (including the role played by both initial inequality and changing inequality), and whether the factors that make the …

measure of the level of poverty. The authors provide some new tools for assessing to what extent the aggregate growth process … (such as percentiles) ranked by income. Taking the area under this curve up to the headcount index of poverty gives a … measure of the rate of pro-poor growth consistent with the Watts index for the level of poverty. The authors give examples …

in the total incidence of consumption poverty between 1987 and 1998. But it was not enough to reduce the total number of … poor people, by various definitions. The incidence of poverty fell in Asia and the Middle East and North Africa, changed … the disappointing rate of poverty reduction: too little economic growth in many of the poorest countries, and persistent …

widely used to fight poverty. There has been some research on such programs, but little is known about their impact on …

This paper identifies and estimates the strength of the reduction in poverty linked to improved opportunities for women … in the expanding maquila sector. A simulation exercise shows that, at a given point in time, poverty in Honduras would … have been 1.5 percentage points higher had the maquila sector not existed. Of this increase in poverty, 0.35 percentage …

Brazil's inequalities in welfare and poverty across and within regions can be accounted for by differences in household …