Working Paper 111 - Assessing Absolute and Relative Pro-Poor Growth: An Application to the MENA Region

This paper proposes a multidimensional test for a partial ordering over absolute and relative pro-poor judgements. It also investigates whether poverty comparisons can be made over classes of indices that incorporate both absolute and relative poverty standards. Besides being robust to whether pro-poor judgements should be absolute or relative, the partial ordering is also robust to choosing over a class of weights to aggregate the impact of growth on the poor, as well as over ranges of absolute and relative poverty lines. The test is applied to recent distributional changes in nine Middle-Eastern and North-African (MENA) countries that have witnessed different impacts of growth in the last two decades.