Middle-income countries (MICs) are now home to most of the world’s extreme poor — the billion people living on less than $1.25 a day and a further billion people living on between $1.25 and $2. At the same time, many MICs are also home to a drastically expanding emerging middle or nonpolar...

This paper updates the distribution of global poverty data and makes projections up to 2020. The paper asks the following question: Do the world’s extreme poor live in poor countries? It is argued that many of the world’s extreme poor already live in countries where the total cost of ending...

Many existing classifications of developing countries are dominated by income per capita (such as the World Bank’s low, middle, and high income thresholds), thus neglecting the multidimensionality of the concept of ‘development’. Even those deemed to be the main ‘alternatives’ to the...

Employment generation is crucial to spreading the benefits of economic growth broadly and to reducing global poverty. And yet, emerging economies face a contemporary challenge to traditional pathways to employment generation: automation, digitalization, and labor-saving technologies. 1.8 billion...

What have the MDGs achieved? And what might their achievements mean for any second generation of MDGs or MDGs 2.0? We argue that the MDGs may have played a role in increasing aid and that development policies beyond aid quantity have seen some limited improvement in rich countries (the evidence...

After a decade of rapid growth in average incomes, many countries have reached middle-income status. At the same time, however, poverty has not fallen so dramatically; as a result, most of the world's poor now live in middle-income countries (MICs). In fact, up to a billion poor people — or a...

The “Palma” is the ratio of national income shares of the top 10 percent of households to the bottom 40 percent, reflecting Gabriel Palma's observation of the stability of the “middle” 50 percent share of income across countries so that distribution is largely a question of the tails. In...

The interplay of between- and within-country inequality, the relative contribution of each to overall global inequality, and the implications this has for who benefits from recent global growth (and by how much), has become a significant avenue for economic research. However, drawing conclusions...

The data available for assessing the current status and trends of global poverty has significantly improved. And yet serious contentions remain. At the same time, a set of recent papers has sought to use these datasets to make poverty projections. Such projections have significant policy...

This paper makes new estimates of global poverty and inequality in 2012 using both ‘old', 2005 and ‘new', 2011 purchasing power parity (PPP) price data in order to assess systematically what difference PPP data makes to the estimates. The methodology for the 2011 PPP data is thought to be...