With the current global crisis, high levels of volatility in trade, capital flows, commodity prices, aid, and the looming threat of climate change, this book brings together high-quality research and presents conceptual issues and empirical results to analyze the determinants of the...

Given Asia's record of rapid economic growth and the conceptual and empirical problems of the current international income poverty line ('dollar-a-day'), this paper discusses whether there is merit to develop an Asia-specific poverty line that addresses some of the shortcomings of the...

This paper discusses the rationale as well as the challenges involved when constructing gender-related indicators of well-being. It argues that such indicators are critically important but that their construction involved a number of conceptual and measurement problems. Among the conceptual...

This paper critically reviews the recent changes to the Global Poverty numbers generated by the World Bank in 2008. While they have little impact on observed poverty trends and while there are good reasons to believe that the previous numbers were on weak foundations, the new numbers on levels...