The authors used distribution data from 109 household surveys done since 1980 in 42 developing and transitional economies to find evidence that high rates of growth in average living standards are associated with higher rates of poverty reduction. The adverse distributional effect of recent...

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...

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...

The author uses a large, nationally representative household survey to analyze the impact of internal remittances (from Guatemala), and international remittances (from the United States) on poverty in Guatemala. With only one exception, he finds that both internal and international remittances...

Do the poor face the same prospects for escaping poverty in high-inequality developing countries as in low-inequality countries? Is it possible for inequality to be so great as to stifle prospects of reducing absolute poverty, even when other initial conditions and policies are favorable to...

The author measures structural adjustment's impact on growth and on the poor in Tanzania. Adjustment reforms have contributed to robust growth. The rural average per capita income in 1991 was, in real terms, significantly higher than in 1983. The Economic Recovery Program, launched in 1986, has...

The authors present new estimates of the extent of the developing world's progress against poverty. By the frugal $1 a day standard, they find that there were 1.1 billion poor in 2001-almost 400 million fewer than 20 years earlier. Over the same period, the number of poor declined by more than...

There have been many attempts to infer latent performance attributes of governments (or other institutions) from conditional comparisons that control for observed variables. Success in doing do could greatly improve government performance. The author critically reviews the econometric...

The authors derive a poverty-efficient allocation of aid and compare it with actual aid allocations. They build the poverty-efficient allocation in two stages. First they use new World Bank ratings of 20 different aspects of national policy to establish the current relationship between aid,...

In the northeast region of Brazil, the poverty picture of the past two decades reveals large fluctuations in the poverty level, and poverty depth. Findings based on the Brazilian annual household survey (Pesquisa Nacional de Amostra Domiciliar, PNAD) datasets from 1981-99 reveal that individual...