"With the focus of international development resources increasingly turned toward poverty reduction, the demand for reliable empirical estimates of poverty levels has grown dramatically... This paper contributes to the poverty measurement literature by introducing an information theoretic...

"The “Cost of Basic Needs” (CBN) approach to drawing consumption-based poverty lines is widely applied and lays credible claim to being the best practice for estimating poverty measures. Unfortunately, a growing mass of evidence indicates that poverty estimates obtained under the CBN...

IFPRI has long argued that spending on agricultural research constitutes a sound investment in poverty reduction and agricultural and economic growth, through improvements in productivity. This argument is based partly on the reported evidence of high rates of return to agricultural research,...