Standard measures of poverty may reveal nothing about whether the poorest of the poor are being lifted-up or left-behind, yet this is a widespread concern among policy makers and citizens. The paper assesses whether public spending on social protection benefits the poorest and hence lifts the...

Standard measures of poverty may reveal nothing about whether the poorest of the poor are being lifted-up or left-behind, yet this is a widespread concern among policy makers and citizens. The paper assesses whether public spending on social protection benefits the poorest and hence lifts the...

"While there is no denying that the world has made huge progress against absolute poverty over the last 200 years, until recent times the bulk of that progress had been made in wealthy countries only. The good news is that we have seen greater progress against poverty in the developing world in...

April 2000 - Community-level targeting of antipoverty programs is now common. Do local community organizations target the poor better than the central government? In one program in Bangladesh, the answer tends to be yes, but performance varies from village to village. The authors try to explain...