The extent to which India's poor have benefited from the country's economic growth has long been debated. A new series of consumption-based poverty measures spanning 50 years, including a 15-year period after economic reforms began in earnest in the early 1990s, is used to examine that issue....

This paper presents axiomatic arguments to make the case for distribution-sensitive multidimensional poverty measures. The commonly-used counting measures violate the strong transfer axiom which requires regressive transfers to be unambiguously poverty-increasing and they are also invariant to...

Multidimensional poverty comparisons can be sensitive to the choice of welfare indicators, the weights assigned to the indicators, as well as the aggregate poverty measure used. This paper examines the robustness of trends in multidimensional poverty in the Philippines to these choices by...

It is theoretically ambiguous whether growth of cities matters more to the rural poor than growth of towns. This paper empirically examines whether growth of India's secondary towns or big cities mattered more to recent rural poverty reduction, noting that data deficiencies have made this a...

Longstanding development issues are revisited in the light of a newly-constructed data set of poverty measures for India spanning 60 years, including 20 years since reforms began in earnest in 1991. The study finds a downward trend in poverty measures since 1970, with an acceleration post-1991,...

Using household survey data for 1998, the authors assess the distributional impact of the recent economic crisis in the Philippines. The results suggest that the impact of the crisis was modest, leading to a five percent reduction in average living standards, and a nine percent increase in the...

This paper presents axiomatic arguments to make the case for distribution-sensitive multidimensional poverty measures. The commonly-used counting measures violate the strong transfer axiom which requires regressive transfers to be unambiguously poverty-increasing and they are also invariant to...