The article assesses the impact of Argentina's main social policy response to the severe economic crisis of 2002. The program was intended to provide direct income support for families with dependent sand whose head had become unemployed because of the crisis. Counter factual comparisons are...

A new assessment is made of the developing world’s progress against poverty. By the frugal $1 a day standard there were 1.1 billion poor people in 2001—almost 400 million fewer than 20 years earlier. During that period the number of poor people declined by more than 400 million in China,...

Alternative scenarios are considered for reducing by one billion the number of people surviving on less than $1.25 a day. The low-case, “pessimistic” path to that goal envisages the developing world outside China returning to the slower pace of economic growth and poverty reduction of the...

Prevailing measures of relative poverty are unchanged when all incomes grow or contract by the same proportion. This property stems from seemingly implausible assumptions about the disutility of relative deprivation and the cost of social inclusion. We propose ‘‘weakly relative’’ lines...

Social experiments are not the only, or even the best, way of addressing the key policy questions faced in the fight against poverty according to Martin Ravallion, the director of the Word Bank's research department

The paper re-visits the site of a large, World Bank-financed, rural development program in China, 10 years after it began and four years after disbursements ended. The program emphasized community participation in multi-sectoral interventions (including farming, animal husbandry, infrastructure...

Development impact calls for knowledgeable development practitioners. How then do the operational staff of the largest development agency value and use its own research? Is there an incentive to learn and does it translate into useful knowledge? A new survey reveals that the bulk of the World...

"Past research has found that subjective questions about an individuals' economic status do not correspond closely to measures of economic welfare based on household income or consumption. Survey respondents undoubtedly hold diverse ideas about what it means to be "poor" or "rich." Further, this...