Prevailing measures of relative poverty put an implausibly high weight on relative deprivation, such that measured poverty does not fall when all incomes grow at the same rate. This stems from the (implicit) assumption in past measures that very poor people incur a negligible cost of social...

We are not seeing faster progress against poverty amongst the poorest developing countries. Yet this is implied by widely accepted"stylized facts"about the development process. The paper tries to explain what is missing from those stylized facts. Consistently with models of economic growth...

The paper presents a major overhaul to the World Bank's past estimates of global poverty, incorporating new and better data. Extreme poverty-as judged by what"poverty"means in the world's poorest countries-is found to be more pervasive than we thought. Yet the data also provide robust evidence...

There has been a steady increase in the occurrence of natural disasters. Yet their effect on economic growth remains unclear, with some studies reporting negative, and others indicating no, or even positive effects. These seemingly contradictory findings can be reconciled by exploring the...

Development aid and policy discussions often assume that poorer countries have less internal capacity for redistribution in favor of their poorest citizens. The assumption is tested using data for 90 developing countries. The capacity for redistribution is measured by the marginal tax rate on...

Public provision of education has often been perceived as universal and egalitarian, but in reality it is not. Political pressure typically results in incidence bias in favor of the rich. The author argues that the bias in political influence resulting from extreme income inequalities is...

Growth is pro-poor if the poverty measure of interest falls. According to this definition there are three potential sources of pro-poor growth: (1) a high rate of growth of average incomes; (2) a high sensitivity of poverty to growth in average incomes; and (3) a poverty-reducing pattern of...

The authors compare economic performance in the CFA (franc) zone with the economic performance in similar countries outside the CFA zone in recent years. The results of their model estimates indicate that the competitive position for CFA members was weaker in the second half of the 1980s than in...

In the context of an empirical model, the authors examine the impact of capital flows, among other fundamentals, on long-term exchange rates in Chile. The real exchange rate and its fundamentals were found to be cointegrated during 1960-92. This cointegration allows a reinterpretation of...

This paper attempts to examine the concept and scope of policy analysis and to distill the lessons of experience in building the capacity for policy analysis in a number of developing countries over the past three decades. It concludes that strategies for developing indigenous capabilities for...