Over the past sixty years, most Asian countries have undergone relatively rapid agricultural transformations that helped jumpstart broader economic development. However, the changes have differed markedly in nature and speed across countries of the region. In much of East and Southeast Asia, the...

This paper examines income mobility in developing countries. We start by synthesizing findings from the available evidence on relative mobility and poverty dynamics. We then describe evidence on economic mobility obtained via synthetic panels constructed from cross-section data. We echo earlier...

Macroeconomic instability has been increasingly considered as a factor lowering average income growth and, in this way, is a factor slowing down poverty reduction. But it can also result in slower poverty reduction for a given average rate of growth, due to poverty traps, often examined at the...

The study presents recent global evidence on the transformation of economic growth to poverty reduction in developing countries, with emphasis on the role of income inequality. The focus is on the period since the early/mid-1990s when growth in these countries as a group has been relatively...

The majority of the world's poor, by income poverty and multi-dimensional poverty, now live in countries officially classified by the World Bank as middle-income countries. Of course nothing happens when a country crosses a (somewhat) arbitrary threshold in per capita income but it does matter...