There has been much discussion recently of structuring tax and transfer programs to ensure that resources go to the poor, with minimal leaks to the nonpoor. The poor have no incentive to earn income with 100 percent marginal tax rates, but how high or low the marginal rate of taxation should be,...

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...

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,...

The authors consider the question of what role safety net transfers should play in very low income countries where a large population live in absolute poverty, and the state has limited resources to fund transfers. The number of people living below minimum acceptable consumption levels will...

The conventional wisdom in mainstream development policy circles is that income transfers to the poor, and safety net policies more generally, are at best a short-term palliative and at worst a waste of money. They are not seen as a core element of an effective long-term poverty reduction...

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...

Views differ on how much India's poor have shared in the growth and contraction in the country's average standard of living since independence. Some have argued that the rural growth that accompanied the green revolution in the 1970s and 1980s brought few gains to the poor in the rural sector,...

In the 1960s and 1970s developing countries viewed UNCTAD (United Nations Conference on Trade&Development) rather than the GATT (General Agreement on Tariffs&Trade) as the main institution through which to promote their interests in international trade. But beginning with the Uruguay Round in...

How many countries are on target to achieve the Millennium Development Goals by 2015? How many countries are off target, and how far are they from the goals? And what factors are essential for improving the odds that off-target countries can reach the goals? This paper examines these questions...