The paper provides new measures of global poverty that take seriously the idea of relative-income comparisons but also acknowledge a deep identification problem when the latent norms defining poverty vary systematically across countries. Welfare-consistent measures are shown to be bounded below...

The paper provides new measures of global poverty that take seriously the idea of relative-income comparisons but also acknowledge a deep identification problem when the latent norms defining poverty vary systematically across countries. Welfare-consistent measures are shown to be bounded below...

Chen and Ravallion use China's national household surveys for rural and urban areas to measure and explain the welfare impacts of the changes in goods and factor prices attributed to WTO accession. Price changes are estimated separately using a general equilibrium model to capture both direct...

By the widely used difference-in-difference method, the Southwest China Poverty Reduction Project had little impact on the proportion of people in beneficiary villages consuming less than $1 a day - despite a public outlay of $400 million. Is that right, or is the true impact being hidden...

In a rare example of a national goal for income distribution besides reducing poverty (for which there is broad consensus), China’s leadership has recently committed to expanding the middle-income share—striving for a less polarized “olive-shaped” distribution. Recognizing the potential...

In a rare example of a national goal for income distribution besides reducing poverty (for which there is broad consensus), China’s leadership has recently committed to expanding the middle-income share—striving for a less polarized “olive-shaped” distribution. Recognizing the potential...

The path of income inequality in post-reform China has been widely interpreted as “China’s Kuznets curve.” We show that the Kuznets growth model of structural transformation in a dual economy, alongside population urbanization, has little explanatory power for our new series of inequality...