The paper provides new measures of global poverty that take seriously the idea of relative-income comparisons but also acknowledge a deep identification problem when the latent norms defining poverty vary systematically across countries. Welfare-consistent measures are shown to be bounded below...

Drawing on data from 265 national sample surveys spanning 83 countries, the authors find that there was a net decrease in the total incidence of consumption poverty between 1987 and 1998. But it was not enough to reduce the total number of poor people, by various definitions. The incidence of...

It is important to know how aggregate economic growth or contraction was distributed according to initial levels of living. In particular, to what extent can it be said that growth was "pro-poor?" There are problems with past methods of addressing this question, notably that the measures used...

The authors use China's national household surveys for rural and urban areas to measure and explain the welfare impacts of the changes in goods and factor prices attributed to WTO accession. Price changes are estimated separately using a general equilibrium model to capture both direct and...

By the widely used difference-in-difference method, the Southwest China Poverty Reduction Project had little impact on the proportion of people in beneficiary villages consuming less than $1 a day-despite a public outlay of $400 million. Is that right, or is the true impact being hidden somehow?...

In what is probably the largest cash transfer program in the world today China’s Dibao program aims to fill all poverty gaps. In theory, the program creates a poverty trap, with 100% benefit withdrawal rate (BWR). But is that what we see in practice? The paper proposes an econometric method of...

We assess the developing world's progress in reducing poverty during the late 1980s using new data on the distribution of household consumption or income per person for 44 countries. Local currencies are adjusted to purchasing power parity. To assess robustness, restricted dominance tests are...

The paper re-visits the site of a large, World Bank-financed, rural development program in China, 10years after it began and four years after disbursements ended. The program emphasized community participation in multi-sectoral interventions (including farming, animal husbandry, infrastructure...

Drawing on 297 national sample surveys spanning 88 countries, we find that there was a net decrease in the overall incidence of both absolute and relative consumption poverty between 1987 and 1998. But it was not enough to reduce the total number of poor by various definitions. The incidence of...