The authors assess the impact of Argentina's main social policy response to the severe economic crisis of 2002. The program aimed to provide direct income support for families with dependents, for whom the head had become unemployed due to the crisis. Counterfactual comparisons are based on a...

Adjustment programs often emphasize protecting social spending - especially pro-poor spending - from cuts. Yet the incidence of fiscal contraction - and hence the case for action to protect public spending on the poor at a time of overall fiscal austerity - is an empirical question, which the...

Prevailing practices in evaluating workfare programs have ignored the disutility of the type of work done, with theoretically ambiguous implications for the impacts on poverty. In the case of India's National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme, past assessments have relied solely on household...

In 2005 India introduced an ambitious national anti-poverty program, now called the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme. The program offers up to 100 days of unskilled manual labor per year on public works projects for any rural household member who wants such work at the...

The paper examines the ways in which recent economic growth has been uneven in China and India and what this has meant for inequality and poverty. Drawing on analyses based on existing household survey data and aggregate data from official sources, the authors show that growth has indeed been...

Longstanding development issues are revisited in the light of a newly-constructed data set of poverty measures for India spanning 60 years, including 20 years since reforms began in earnest in 1991. The study finds a downward trend in poverty measures since 1970, with an acceleration post-1991,...

Alternative scenarios are considered for reducing by one billion the number of people living below $1.25 a day. The low-case, "pessimistic," path to that goal would see the developing world outside China returning to its slower pace of growth and poverty reduction of the 1980s and 1990s, though...