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 state of Bahia, Brazil has made progress in reducing poverty and improving social indicators in the past decade. Despite this progress, Bahia's poverty is among the highest and its social indicators are among the lowest in Brazil. Currently, 41 percent of Bahia's population live in...

After a decade of slow economic growth Egypt's rate of growth recovered in the late 1990s, averaging more than five percent a year. But the effect of this growth on poverty patterns has not been systematically examined using consistent, comparable household datasets. In this paper, the authors...

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...

Unlike most developing countries, consistent poverty measures for India can be tracked over a long time. The authors used 20 household surveys for rural India for the years 1958-90 to measure the effects of agricultural growth on rural poverty and on the rural labor market and to find out how...

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...

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...

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...