Relative deprivation, shame and social exclusion can matter to the welfare of people everywhere. The authors argue that such social effects on welfare call for a reconsideration of how we assess global poverty, but they do not support standard measures of relative poverty. The paper argues...

In 2005, China participated for the first time in the International Comparison Program (ICP), which collects primary data across countries on the prices for an internationally comparable list of goods and services. This paper examines the implications of the new Purchasing Power Parity (PPP)...

The paper revisits 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...

Empirical studies of tax and benefit incidence routinely ignore behavioral responses and measurement errors. This paper offers an econometric method of estimating the mean benefit withdrawal rate (marginal tax rate) allowing for incentive effects, measurement errors, and correlated latent...

The paper presents the first major update of the international "USD 1 a day" poverty line, first proposed in 1990 for measuring absolute poverty by the standards of the world's poorest countries. In a new data set of national poverty lines we find that a marked economic gradient only emerges...

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...

August 2000 - Between 1987 and 1998, the incidence of poverty fell in Asia and the Middle East and North Africa, changed little in Latin America and Sub-Saharan Africa, and rose in Eastern Europe and Central Asia. Too little economic growth in the poorest countries and persistent inequalities...

The paper provides new measures of global poverty that take seriously the idea of relative-income comparisons but also acknowledge a deep identification problem when the latent norms defining poverty vary systematically across countries. Welfare-consistent measures are shown to be bounded below...

While the incidence of extreme poverty in China fell dramatically over 1980–2001, progress was uneven over time and across provinces. Rural areas accounted for the bulk of the gains to the poor, though migration to urban areas helped. The pattern of growth mattered. Rural economic growth was...