Debate on what should follow the UN Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) from 2015 onwards has mushroomed. A focus on "ending" poverty (however defined) is likely to form a central part of the future framework. This paper discusses MDG 1, income poverty. Our paper is a commentary written to...

Social protection has evolved rapidly both conceptually and in practice, and is now a key policy issue in humanitarian and development debates. However, debates have sometimes been misled by approaches that pay inadequate attention to context-specific factors, do not fully consider the sequence...

Social protection aims to provide a national platform for smoothly transitioning from a chaotic collection of shock responses to an institutionalized system for risk and non-risk management. For the poorest, the transition aims to move away from ad hoc, unpredictable relief to national safety...

The paper presents a new composite indicator - the poverty and hunger index (PHI) - to measure countries' performance toward achieving millennium development goal No.1 (MDG1) on halving poverty and hunger by 2015. Building on the statistical structure of the human development index, the PHI...

Progress toward eradicating poverty and hunger is patchy and generally too slow. New impetus is needed to meet internationally accepted goals, better informed by recent progress and challenges. The United Nations Millennium Development Goal No. 1 (MDG-1) aims to halve the proportion of people...

The Millennium Development Goal No. 1 (MDG-1) aims to halve the number of people affected by poverty and hunger by 2015. Poverty and hunger are closely related overlapping phenomena, but they are not identical. Each affects different sets of people or countries in different ways, and their...

Debate about national and international poverty measurement continued to evolve (see for example Abu-Ismail et al., 2012). The international poverty lines of US$1.25 and US$2/day are, respectively, the average of the national poverty lines for the poorest 15 countries and the average for all...

Debate about national and international poverty measurement continued to evolve (see for example, Abu-Ismail et al., 2012). The basic question of how many poor people there are in the world generally assumes that poverty is measured according to international poverty lines (IPLs). Yet, an...

This paper reviews key issues in the'cash versus food'debate, including as they relate to political economy, theory, evidence, and practice. In doing so, it benefited from a new generation of 12 impact evaluations deliberately comparing alternative transfer modalities. Findings show that...