The deep economic crisis that characterized Eastern Europe in the 1980's had a strong impact on average incomes of the population and on the percentage of people living below the poverty line. The situation deteriorated most sharply in Poland, where the percentage of the poor in total population...

Public spending has effects which are complex to trace and difficult to quantify. But the composition of public expenditure has become the key instrument by which development agencies seek to promote economic development. In recent years, the development assistance to heavily indebted poor...

The author demonstrates what can happen to the welfare of households and individuals, and to poverty, in a low- to middle-income country, under structural adjustment and recession. Cote d'Ivoire was one of the first African countries to launch a structural adjustment program with support from...

In this analysis of public policy to reduce poverty, the authors point out, among other things, that typically the highest incidence and severity of poverty are still found in rural areas, especially if ill-watered. For many of the rural poor, the only immediate route out of poverty is by...

The states in the Brazilian Amazon have made progress in reducing poverty and improving social indicators in the last decade. Despite this progress, the poverty rate in the Amazon is among the highest in Brazil. As of 2000, rural poverty is the greatest challenge. In Par?, not only is the...

Measurement problemshave confounded recent attempts to assess Bangladesh's progress in reducing poverty. The issues at stake, though poorly understood, are common in poverty measurement. The authors review the issues, recommend an operational approach to resolving them with available data, and...

review recent evidence on the trends in household well-being in Africa during the 1990s. They draw on the findings of a series of studies on poverty dynamics that use the better data sets now available. The authors begin by taking a broad view of poverty, tracing changes in both income poverty...

There has been much debate about how much India's poor have shared in the economic growth unleashed by economic reforms in the 1990s. The authors argue that India has probably maintained its 1980s rate of poverty reduction in the 1990s. However, there is considerable diversity in performance...

Poverty is intrinsically a complex social construct, and even when it is narrowly defined by a deficit of consumption spending, many thorny issues arise in setting an appropriate"poverty line". The authors limit themselves to examining how poverty - defined on a consistent, welfare-comparable...

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...