Most poor people in developing countries still live in rural areas and are primarily engaged in low productivity farming activities. Thus pathways out of poverty are likely to be strongly connected to productivity increases in the rural economy, whether they are realized in farming, in rural...

Development, at its most basic level, is about making poor people less poor. But how do people actually escape poverty? There are few quantitative models that have been tested over significant historical periods to show how it happens. In this working paper, CGD senior fellow Peter Timmer and...