The extent to which India's poor have benefited from the country's economic growth has long been debated. A new series of consumption-based poverty measures spanning 50 years, including a 15-year period after economic reforms began in earnest in the early 1990s, is used to examine that issue....

The article presents the first major update of the international $1 a day poverty line, proposed in World Development Report 1990: Poverty for measuring absolute poverty by the standards of the world's poorest countries. In a new and more representative data set of national poverty lines, a...

Data from China's national rural and urban household surveys are used to measure and explain the welfare impacts of changes in goods and factor prices attributable to accession to the World Trade Organization. The price changes are estimated separately using a general equilibrium model to...

In theory, the informational advantage of decentralizing the eligibility criteria for a federal antipoverty program could come at a large cost to the program's performance in reaching the poor nationally. Whether this happens in practice depends on the size of the local-income effect on the...

Comparisons of poverty, such as where or when poverty is greatest, typically matter far more for policy choices than do aggregate measures of poverty, such as how many people are deemed poor. We examine alternative methods for constructing poverty profiles, focusing on their internal consistency...

How can a central government monitor the performance of a decentralized poverty program when the incidence of the program's benefits is unobserved at the local level? This article shows that, using a poverty map and the corresponding spending allocation across geographic areas, one can identify...

Assessments of the distributional effects of public spending reforms have generally been based on average rates of program participation by income or expenditure group. This practice can be deceptive because the socioeconomic composition of participants can change as a social program expands or...

It has been claimed that in recent times the poor have lost ground, both relatively and absolutely, even when average levels of living have risen. This article tests that claim using household surveys for 67 developing and transitional economies over 1981-94. It finds that changes in inequality...

Using a new series of consistent, consumption-based poverty measures spanning forty years, we assess how much India's poor shared in the country's economic growth, taking into account its urban-rural and output composition. Rural consumption growth reduced poverty in both rural and urban areas....