Population growth, an unfinished agenda of communicable diseases and maternal health and nutrition, and the rapid rise of Non-communicable diseases are putting increasing strain on not just the Ministry of Health budget, but also the broader financial position of the government as a whole. These...

In China, as in many developing countries, poverty is primarily a rural phenomenon. Considerable efforts have been made over the last few decades to reduce poverty in China's rural areas; and indeed, the poverty rate in these areas has fallen from 30.7% in 1978 to 3.8% in 2009. This paper begins...

Agricultural trade is widely considered as an important contributor to developing countries‘ economic growth, poverty alleviation and food security. This report identifies and analyses some of the most important supply-side constraints to developing countries‘ exports of agricultural...

This note raises the IMF’s profile on a number of issues related to inequality, unemployment, governance, etc. It builds on earlier empirical work that examined correlations between growth downbreaks/duration of growth spells and a range of macro/policy/institutional factors. This paper is...

This article is distinct in its application of the logit transformation to the poverty ratio for the purpose of empirically examining whether the financial sector helps improve standards of living for low-income people. We propose the term financial permeation to describe how financial networks...

This paper investigates the determinants of the growth elasticity of poverty by using the internationally designed poverty line, measured by the share of the population living below USD 1.25 per day. We identify the determinants of changes in the poverty rate of countries using single and...

The global financial crisis hit the economies of most commodities exporting countries of Sub-Sahara Africa (SSA) mainly through trade and commodities prices collapse. Theoretical and empirical literature postulates debilitating effects of these on growth, poverty and sustainable development...

Within the last decade governments of donors and developing countries have committed themselves to achieving a number of International Development Targets (IDTs) to be reached by 2015. These include halving the proportion of people living in extreme poverty and ensuring universal primary...

The aim of this paper is to examine the main reasons how aid can contribute to poverty reduction, the channels through which it can do so and the lessons of the literature on these issues, with a special focus on the way aid can address the vulnerability faced by many developing countries.

The 2008-09 global economic crises have shown that no country is immune to external challenges. When policy controls are missing or not used efficiently, crises can reverse progress even in advanced economies. This unexpected outcome has increased concerns about the ability of governments in...