In order to track progress in MDG1 and explicitly link growth, inequality, and poverty reduction, several measures of pro-poor growth have been proposed in the literature and used in applied academic and policy work. These measures, particularly the ones derived from the growth incidence curve,...

Economic growth and poverty reduction require for a country to establish efficient rules for economic and political transactions. Poor countries suffer from inadequate, inefficient transaction rules. Formal rules (e.g., laws, policies) must be nested in hospitable behavioural norms and values....

Zambia has undergone a dramatic transformation of economic policy during the 1990s. The election in 1991 of the Movement for Multi-party Democracy government saw the introduction of a series of major economic reforms designed to transform the Zambian economy from a relatively inward looking and...

Measuring poverty remains a complex and contentious issue. This is particularly true in sub-Saharan Africa where poverty rates are higher, information bases typically weaker, and the underlying determinants of welfare relatively volatile. This paper employs recently collected data on household...

While land reforms have long been motivated as a potential policy lever of rural growth and development, there is remarkably little evidence of the direct impacts of such reforms. In an effort to fill this lacunae, this paper examines South Africa's Land Redistribution for Agricultural...

While economic growth generally reduces income poverty, there are pronounced differences in the strength of this relationship across countries. Typical explanations for this variation include measurement errors in growth-poverty accounting and countries' different compositions of economic...

In this paper, we analyze how the distribution of selected non-income welfare indicators changed between 1997 and 2003 in Colombia. We use multidimensional pro-poor growth measurement techniques and create indices for assets, health, education, and subjective welfare using two alternative...

This paper proposes a framework for incorporating longitudinal distributional changes into poverty decomposition. It is shown that changes in the Sen-Shorrocks-Thon index over time can be decomposed into two components—one component reflects the progressivity of income growth among the...

In this paper we explore what impact, if any, government debts have on achieving the Millennium Development Goals for the Indian states. To fulfill the goals, national governments, especially in the developing world, have to undertake major investments in the social sector; but how much they...