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...

We introduce two separate datasets - the Global Consumption Dataset and the Global Income Dataset - containing an unprecedented portrait of consumption and income of persons over time, within and across countries, around the world. The benchmark version of the dataset presents estimates in...

The goal of this paper is to examine the impact of human rights on income distribution and poverty by exploring how both aid and trade can influence poverty and income distribution through human rights. The analysis employs data for 125 countries and uses a number of panel data methods. The...

Most Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development countries have accepted, in principle at least, the 50-year-old commitment of contributing 0.7 per cent of gross national income to supporting the development of countries in the Global South. But what if all countries made a universal...

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 present study examines the degree to which income distribution affects the ability of economic growth to reduce poverty, based on 1990s data for a sample of rural and urban sectors of African economies. Using the basic needs approach, an analysis-of-covariance model is derived and estimated,...

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 paper tracks recent changes in the components of social protection in Latin America, the reforms to social insurance in the 1990s and the growth of social assistance in the 2000s, and assesses their effects on poverty and inequality and implications for welfare institutions in the region....

This paper examines the macroeconomic policies and outcomes experienced by the Latin American economies during the period 1990-2010. Macroeconomic policies refer to exchange rates, monetary and aggregate fiscal policies, while macroeconomic outcomes, on the other hand, refer to the patterns of...

In the presence of inequality a status-driven utility function reconciles the conflict between income-based and nutrition-based measures of poverty. Moreover, it can explain why the poor tend to save less, an established empirical fact in the developing countries. The result is independent of...