More effective development aid could greatly improve poverty reduction in the areas where poverty reduction is expected to lag: Sub-Saharan Africa, Eastern Europe, and Central Asia. Even more potent would be significant policy reform in the countries themselves. The authors develop a model of...

The authors show how subjective poverty lines can be derived using simple qualitative assessments of perceived consumption adequacy, based on a household survey. Respondents were asked whether their consumption of food, housing, and clothing was adequate for their family's needs. The author's...

This paper presents evidence about the impact on school enrollment of a program in Ecuador that gives cash transfers to the 40 percent poorest families. The evaluation design consists of a randomized experiment for families around the first quintile of the poverty index and of a regression...

Cote d'Ivoire's economy declined drastically in the second half of the 1980s. The incidence of poverty climbed from 30 percent in 1985 to 35 percent in 1987, and jumped to 46 percent in 1988. But how widespread was the collapse in living standards? Did a lucky few escape the decline? Using...

Comparisons of poverty rates are only rarely based on identical underlying definitions of welfare. The authors examine the sensitivity of poverty rates calculated from alternative definitions of consumption. They consider what theory can say about the direction of bias in comparisons and show...

After a decade of slow economic growth Egypt's rate of growth recovered in the late 1990s, averaging more than five percent a year. But the effect of this growth on poverty patterns has not been systematically examined using consistent, comparable household datasets. In this paper, the authors...

The author identifies conditions under which the urban sector's share of the poor population in a developing country will be a strictly increasing and strictly convex function of its share of the total population. Cross-sectional data afor 39 countries and time-series data for for India are...

The author observes that famine, defined as widespread hunger or starvation, has occurred in most parts of the world in the twentieth century. Famines are more avoidable now than ever before. Famines defy simple explanations and geographic boundaries. They have occurred under both socialist and...

These days it seems that almost everyone in the development community is talking about"pro-poor growth."What exactly is it, and how can we measure it? Is ordinary economic growth always"pro-poor growth"or is that some special kind of growth? And if it is something special, what makes it happen?...

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...