By the widely used difference-in-difference method, the Southwest China Poverty Reduction Project had little impact on the proportion of people in beneficiary villages consuming less than $1 a day - despite a public outlay of $400 million. Is that right, or is the true impact being hidden...

Two tradeoffs have been widely seen to severely constrain the scope for attacking poverty using redistributive transfers in poor countries: An equity-efficiency tradeoff and an insurance-efficiency tradeoff. Ravallion provides a critical overview of recent theoretical and empirical work that has...

In a rare example of a national goal for income distribution besides reducing poverty (for which there is broad consensus), China’s leadership has recently committed to expanding the middle-income share—striving for a less polarized “olive-shaped” distribution. Recognizing the potential...

There has been much debate about how much India's poor have shared in the economic growth unleashed by economic reforms in the 1990s. The paper argues that India has probably maintained its 1980s rate of poverty reduction in the 1990s. However, there is considerable diversity in performance...

Longstanding development issues are revisited in the light of a newly-constructed data set of poverty measures for India spanning 60 years, including 20 years since reforms began in earnest in 1991. The study finds a downward trend in poverty measures since 1970, with an acceleration post-1991,...

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...

Ethnic riots broke out in Malaysia in 1969, prompting a national effort at affirmative action favoring the poorer (majority) of “Bumiputera” (mainly Malays). Since then, Malaysia's official poverty measures indicate one of the fastest long-term rates of poverty reduction in the world, due to...

The structure, efficiency, and growth of production affect (and are affected by) the distribution of consumption. Poverty analysis has three tasks: (1) to define and describe poverty, (2) to understand its causes, and (3) to inform policy. This chapter outlines history of economic thought on...