The paper develops a concept and a measure of the monetary capacity of a country to reduce its own poverty and shows how these tools can be used to guide budget allocations or the allocation of aid. The authors call this concept the income lever. Making use of tax and distributive theory, the...

In the last year or so, markedly different claims have been heard within the development community about just how much progress is being made against poverty and inequality in the current period of"globalization."Ravallion provides a nontechnical overview of the conceptual and methodological...

Is a pro-growth strategy always the best pro-poor strategy? To address this issue, the author provides an empirical evaluation of the impact of a series of pro-growth policies on inequality and headcount poverty. He relies on a large macroeconomic data set and estimate dynamic panel models that...

Most empirical work on how growth affects poverty and inequality has been based on international panel data sets. Panels can also be used within a country, if the analysis is carried out at the regional level. The author does this for Bangladesh, where regional panel estimates indicate that...

Drawing on data from 265 national sample surveys spanning 83 countries, the authors find that there was a net decrease in the total incidence of consumption poverty between 1987 and 1998. But it was not enough to reduce the total number of poor people, by various definitions. The incidence of...

The authors use 20 household surveys for India's 15 major states, spanning 1960-94, to study how initial conditions and the sectoral composition of economic growth interact to influence how much economic growth reduced poverty. The elasticities of measured poverty to farm yields and development...

The authors investigate the dynamics of poverty and income inequality in a cross-section of socio-economic groups and geographical regions over the five-year growth period following the 1994 devaluation of the CFA franc in Burkina Faso. Results show rapidly increasing urban poverty accompanied...

The"stylized fact"that distribution must get worse with economic growth in poor countries before it can get better turns out not to be a fact at all. Growth's effects on inequality can go either way and are contingent on several other factors. The authors found no sign in the new cross-country...

The author uses four-year panel data from Poland's Household Budget Survey to explore the distinction between transitory and long-term poverty, a crucial distinction in designing and evaluating poverty reduction strategies. The author analyzes household welfare trajectories during the period...

During Russia's economic transition real income declined precipitously for most of the population. How were Russians'perceptions of the minimum income level needed to survive affected by such a rapid decline in their incomes? Based on data collected from repeated surveys of individuals during...