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 …

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 …

The challenges faced in calibrating poverty and welfare measures to objective data have long been recognized. Until …, the idea of a "social subjective poverty line" (below which people tend to think they are poor, but above which they do … not) is arguably the most conceptually appealing way of defining poverty. However, the paper points to a number of …

Word searches of Google's library of digitized books suggest that there have been two "Poverty Enlightenments" since … only the second came with a widespread belief that poverty could and should be eliminated. After the first Poverty … Enlightenment, references to "poverty" (as a percentage of all words) were on a trend decline until 1960, after which there was a …

There has been a growing interest in what have come to be termed "multidimensional indices of poverty." Advocates for … that other factors need to be considered when quantifying the extent of poverty and informing policy making for fighting … poverty. However, the author argues that there are two poorly understood issues in assessing these indices. First, does one …

National poverty lines vary greatly across the world, from under $1 per person per day to over $40 (at 2005 purchasing … poverty? For all except the poorest countries, the absolute, nutrition-based, poverty lines found in practice tend to behave … ample scope for such relativity, even when nutritional norms are common across countries. Both macro data on poverty lines …

China has seen a huge reduction in the incidence of extreme poverty since the economic reforms that started in the late … China??s growth mattered to poverty reduction using a new provincial panel data set constructed for this purpose. The … econometric tests support the view that the primary sector (mainly agriculture) has been the main driving force in poverty …

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 …