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...

"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...