We estimate the required time and the minimum necessary growth rate to halve poverty incidence and poverty intensity in Mexico’s rural and urban areas for a series of counterfactual distribution and growth scenarios. Results show that, given the current income distribution, per capita incomes...

The Millennium Declaration set 2015 as the target date for halving the number of people living in extreme poverty. Exceptional progress in some developing countries makes achieving that goal globally a realistic possibility. However, many countries will fall far short, and up to 1 billion people...

An important goal of Millennium Development Goals that Vietnam committed is to reduce the overall and food poverty. Although Vietnam has achieved remarkable reduction in poverty during the recent years, Vietnam might not achieve its MDG on poverty reduction because of high inflation and economic...

Focusing on the low-income parts of the world and reviewing the different ways we can define poverty, I first argue that what people generally mean by poverty – or, more broadly, by economic well-being – cannot be adequately captured by a single, absolute measure such as income level or a...

This paper addresses two issues concerning the measurement of pro‐poor growth, a central concept for sustainable poverty reduction in developing countries. First, it attempts to clarify the debates about the definition and measurement of pro poor growth distinguishing between a weak and a...

This study uses simulations to explore the possibility of halving the percentage of people living in extreme poverty in Africa by 2015. A pro-poor growth-scenario and a constant-inequality scenario are compared. It is shown that initial levels of inequality and mean per capita income determine...

We propose a model that accounts for the potential feedback between schooling performance, human capital accumulation and long run GDP growth, and links these results with poverty incidence. Our simulation exercise takes into account targets for education indicators and GDP growth itself (as...

"This paper analyzes trends in poverty, income inequality and social policies in Peru in the last twenty years. Our objective is to explain what lies behind the generalized perception and complain by Peruvians that welfare and living standards have not got any better in at least two generations....

Background: The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) are a set of eight goals and corresponding indicators that were agreed to following the adoption of the United Nations Millennium Declaration in September 2000 by leaders of 189 countries. The goals state specific objectives for the world to...

Raising school enrollment, like economic development in general, takes a long time. This is partly because, as a mountain of empirical evidence now shows, economic conditions and slowly- changing parental education levels determine children’s school enrollment to a greater degree than...