Cross-country comparisons of social indicators controlling for income and/or social spending have been widely used to measure and explain "social efficiency," analogously to "technical efficiency" in production. The article argues that these methods are clouded in ambiguities about what is being...

Concerns about incentives and targeting naturally arise when cash transfers are used to fight poverty. The authors address these concerns in the context of China's Di Bao program, which uses means-tested transfers to try to assure that no registered urban resident has an income below a...

Two tradeoffs have been widely seen to severely constrain the scope for attacking poverty using redistributive transfers in poor countries: an equity-efficiency tradeoff and an insurance-efficiency tradeoff. The author provides a critical overview of recent theoretical and empirical work that...

The"stylized fact"that distribution must get worse with economic growth in poor countries before it can get better turns out not to be a fact at all. Growth's effects on inequality can go either way and are contingent on several other factors. The authors found no sign in the new cross-country...

The authors report new estimates of measures of absolute poverty for the developing world over 1981-2004. A clear trend decline in the percentage of people who are absolutely poor is evident, although with uneven progress across regions. They find more mixed success in reducing the total number...

The hypothesis that consumption evolves over time as a martingale process is tested on household panel data for three villages in South India. A novel feature of the methodology is that it gives consistent estimates of dynamic effects in short panels. The estimated coefficients of lagged...

Has poverty continued to fall with growth in India in the 1990s, or has the nature of the growth process changed, such that the poor have been left behind? This paper tries to answer those questions. We do not attempt to assess the impact of India's macroeconomic reforms of the 1990s on poverty,...

We test for the existence of poverty traps and distribution-dependent growth using a nonlinear dynamic panel data model of household incomes allowing for endogenous attrition. Our estimates for Hungary and Russia in the 1990s reveal significant nonlinearity in the dynamics, consistent with the...