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 …

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 …

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 …

We are not seeing faster progress against poverty amongst the poorest developing countries. Yet this is implied by … for 100 developing countries reveals an adverse effect on consumption growth of high initial poverty incidence at a given … initial mean. A high incidence of poverty also entails a lower subsequent rate of progress against poverty at any given growth …