Summary One of the most frequent critiques of the HDI is that it does not take into account inequality within countries. We suggest a methodology which allows to compute the three components and the overall HDI for quintiles of the income distribution. This allows comparisons of the level in...

Summary Current concepts and measures of pro-poor growth are entirely focused on the income dimension of well-being. This neglects non-income dimensions of poverty as well as the multidimensionality of poverty and well-being. In this paper, we extend the pro-poor growth toolbox to individual and...

One of the most serious weaknesses of the human development index (HDI) is that it does not take into account the distribution of human development within a country. All attempts to capture inequality in the HDI have used aggregate information and there exists no HDI at the household level. We...

Summary Households in developing countries are frequently hit by severe idiosyncratic and covariate shocks leading to high consumption volatility. A household's currently observed poverty status might therefore not be a good indicator of the household's general vulnerability to poverty. In the...

We investigate whether donors give more aid to countries with larger gender gaps in education, health, or women’s rights, and whether they reward improvements in those indicators. We find some evidence that high gender gaps in education and health are associated with higher allocation of aid...

In Nowak-Lehmann et al. (2012), we used time-series methods to investigate the impact of aid on per capita GDP. Lof, Mekasha, and Tarp (LMT, 2014) criticize our econometric approach, our interpretation, and our data-handling procedure which lead to a large share of missing observations in some...

This article investigates whether heterogeneous subgroups of female-headed households are worse off than households headed by men. It analyzes the correlates of consumption, shock exposure, and severity, as well as vulnerability to poverty. Using panel data of over 4000 rural households from...

Summary This paper first reviews the debate on the definition of pro-poor growth and argues that a relative definition has merits when defining the state of pro-poor growth, while an absolute definition is most suitable when analyzing the rate of pro-poor growth. The second contribution is to...