As the world approaches the target year of the Millennium Development Goals and passes into the new, post-2015 era, the development community has made a call for a new international development goal of eradication of extreme poverty by 2030. How feasible is that? For most of the developing...

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...

Comparing changes in inequality with initial levels, using new data, the author finds that within-country inequality in income or per capita consumption is converging toward medium levels--a Gini index around 40 percent. The finding is robust to allow for serially independent measurement error...

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"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...

Thepaper studies regional (spatial) inequality in the five most populous countries in the world: China, India, the United States, Indonesia, and Brazil in the period 1980-2000. They are all federations or quasi-federations composed of entities with substantial economic autonomy. Two types of...

Pessimists say industrialization increased poverty; optimists say it did not. The authors argue that how much industrialization eradicates poverty depends on the form industrialization takes. It is not economic growth by itself, but the processes and policies associated with different growth...

It is common for central governments, to delegate authority over the targeting of welfare programs to local community organizations - which may be better informed about who is poor, though possibly less accountable for getting the money to the local poor - while the center retains control over...