"The world made significant progress on reducing poverty between 1981 and 2001 — the number of people in developing countries living on less than US$1 a day fell from 1.5 billion to 1.1 billion, or from 40 to 21 percent of the world's population. In fact, however, nearly all this progress...

Can extending social welfare expenditures promote economic growth? This issue has been discussed extensively, with some research pointing to net benefits while others find a net negative impact. Insight can be gained by careful analysis of several sub-questions. For example, for two countries...