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...

We show how differences in aggregate human development outcomes over time and space can be additively decomposed into a pure mean income (growth) component, a component attributed to differences in the distribution of income, and components attributed to 'non-income' factors and differences in...

China's rapid economic growth has been the proximate cause of the huge reduction in the incidence of poverty since 1980. Yet, the growth process has been highly uneven across sectors and regions. We test whether the pattern of China's growth mattered to poverty reduction using a new provincial...

Brazil's slow pace of poverty reduction between the mid-1980s and the mid-2000s reflects both low growth and a low growth elasticity of poverty reduction. Using GDP data disaggregated by state and sector for a twenty-year period, this paper finds considerable variation in the poverty-reducing...

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...

In the last year or so, markedly different claims have been heard within the development community about how just much progress is being made against poverty and inequality in the current period of “globalization.” This paper provides a non-technical overview of the conceptual and...

The "developing world's middle class" is defined here as those who are not poor when judged by the median poverty line of developing countries, but are still poor by US standards. The "Western middle class" is defined as those who are not poor by US standards. Although barely 80 million people...