The paper presents a major overhaul to the World Bank's past estimates of global poverty, incorporating new and better … data. Extreme poverty-as judged by what quot;povertyquot; means in the world's poorest countries-is found to be more … pervasive than we thought. Yet the data also provide robust evidence of continually declining poverty incidence and depth since …

The authors report new estimates of measures of absolute poverty for the developing world over 1981-2004. A clear trend … no sustained progress in reducing the number of poor, with rising poverty counts in some regions, notably Sub …-Saharan Africa. There are encouraging signs of progress in reducing the incidence of poverty in all regions after 2000, although it …

Longstanding development issues are revisited in the light of a newly-constructed data set of poverty measures for … poverty measures since 1970, with an acceleration post-1991, despite rising inequality. Faster poverty decline came with … has ceased to matter, as all three sectors contributed to poverty reduction …

While self-assessments of welfare have become popular for measuring poverty and estimating welfare effects, the methods … considerable doubt on the meaning of widely-used summary measures such as subjective poverty rates. Nonetheless, under the … poverty and welfare …

-targeting transfers to poor people. This incentive argument does not imply, however, that workfare is more cost-effective against poverty … that for the same budget, workfare has less impact on poverty than either a basic-income scheme (providing the same … transfer to all) or uniform transfers based on the government's below-poverty-line ration cards. For workfare to dominate other …

data are deceptive. The program entails a nominal 100 percent benefit withdrawal rate -- a poverty trap. However, the paper …

-case, "pessimistic," path to that goal would see the developing world outside China returning to its slower pace of growth and poverty … lift one billion people out of poverty. The more optimistic path would maintain the (impressive) progress against poverty …

Against what standards should we judge the developing world's overall performance against poverty going forward? The …. The first measure is absolute consumption poverty, as judged by what "poverty" means in the poorest countries. The second … is a new measure of global poverty combining absolute poverty with country-specific social inclusion needs, consistently …