We use 20 household surveys for India's 15 major states spanning 1960?1994 to study how the sectoral composition of economic growth and initial conditions interact to influence how much growth reduced consumption poverty. The elasticities of measured poverty to farm yields and development...

The path of income inequality in post-reform China has been widely interpreted as “China’s Kuznets curve.” We show that the Kuznets growth model of structural transformation in a dual economy, alongside population urbanization, has little explanatory power for our new series of inequality...

Thirty years ago, Nanak Kakwani provided elegant nonparametric formulae for the point elasticities of measures of poverty with respect to changes in the mean of the distribution of income, thus analytically linking the poverty measures to key macroeconomic aggregates. Numerous insights are found...

The traditional approach to poverty measurement puts no explicit weight on success at increasing the typical level of living of the poorest—raising the consumption floor. To address this deficiency, the paper defines and measures the expected value of the floor, allowing for transient effects...

In the last year or so, markedly different claims have been heard within the development community about how just much progress is being made against poverty and inequality in the current period of “globalization.” This paper provides a non-technical overview of the conceptual and...