Recent National Sample Surveys point to significant poverty reduction in India since 2004/05, with a marked acceleration between 2009/10 and 2011/12. This paper enquires into important aspects of income mobility between 2004/05 and 2011/12, based on new statistical methods to convert the three...

This paper analyzes the Indian National Sample Survey data spanning 1987/88-2011/12 to uncover patterns of transition into and out of different classes of the consumption distribution. At the aggregate level, income growth has accelerated, accompanied by accelerating poverty decline. Underlying...

There is an increasingly stronger demand for more frequent and accurate poverty estimates, despite the oftentimes unavailable household consumption data. This paper offers a review of alternative imputation methods that have been employed to provide poverty estimates in such contexts. These...

This study documents short-term economic mobility in Malaysia over the first two decades of the twenty-first century, at the population level and for various subgroups. The findings show broad and steady improvements in well-being, as evidenced by large decreases in chronic poverty and...

Tracking poverty is predicated on the availability of comparable consumption data and reliable price deflators. However, regular series of strictly comparable data are only rarely available. Price deflators are also often missing or disputed. In response, poverty prediction methods that track...

This paper validates a recently proposed method to estimate intra-generational mobility through repeated cross-sectional surveys. The technique allows the creation of a "synthetic panel" -- done by predicting future or past household income using a set of simple modeling and error structure...

Movements in and out of poverty are of core interest to both policymakers and economists. Yet the panel data needed to analyze such movements are rare. In this paper, the authors build on the methodology used to construct poverty maps to show how repeated cross-sections of household survey data...

Standard approaches to decomposing how much group differences contribute to inequality rarely show significant between-group inequality, and are of limited use in comparing populations with different numbers of groups. This study applies an adaptation to the standard approach that remedies these...

This paper provides evidence consistent with elite capture of Social Fund investment projects in Ecuador. Exploiting a unique combination of data-sets on village-level income distributions, Social Fund project administration, and province level electoral results, the authors test a simple model...

The authors propose a modification to the conventional approach of decomposing income inequality by population sub-groups. Specifically, they propose a measure that evaluates observed between-group inequality against a benchmark of maximum between-group inequality that can be attained when the...