It is theoretically ambiguous whether growth of cities matters more to the rural poor than growth of towns. This paper empirically examines whether growth of India's secondary towns or big cities mattered more to recent rural poverty reduction, noting that data deficiencies have made this a...

Longstanding development issues are revisited in the light of a newly-constructed data set of poverty measures for India spanning 60 years, including 20 years since reforms began in earnest in 1991. The study finds a downward trend in poverty measures since 1970, with an acceleration post-1991,...

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 authors estimate that in 1985 about one in five persons in the developing world lived in poverty, judged by the standards of the poorest countries. This rises to one in three at a common, more generous, poverty line. The aggregate consumption short-fall of the poorest fifth is about one half...

The unevenness of the rise in rural living standards in the various states of India since the 1950s allowed the authors to study the causes of poverty. They modeled the evolution of average consumption and various poverty measures using pooled state-level data for 1957-91. They found that...