Relative deprivation, shame and social exclusion can matter to the welfare of people everywhere. The authors argue that such social effects on welfare call for a reconsideration of how we assess global poverty, but they do not support standard measures of relative poverty. The paper argues...

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...

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...

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...

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...

During the 1990s, China's poverty declined significantly across a wide range of poverty lines. China's poor have benefited much less from economic growth than the rich. Education is positively and significantly related to growth and poverty reduction - but the regional disparities of education...

The widely held view that China has greatly reduced income poverty over the last 40 years does not accord with all the evidence. The paper tries to reconcile the conflicting findings. The fact that strongly-relative measures show rising poverty is easily understood, since such measures depend...