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...

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...

Poverty and well-being are multidimensional. Nobody questions that deprivations and achievements go beyond income. There is, however, sharp disagreement on whether the various dimensions of poverty and well-being can be aggregated into a single, multidimensional index in a meaningful way. Is...

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 considers the effectiveness and efficiency of global growth, as a route to poverty reduction, since 1990 and then demonstrates the redistributive challenges implicit in various poverty lines and scenarios: the significance being that this historical data can inform understanding and...

Latin America is known to have income inequality among the highest in the world. That inequality has been invoked to explain low growth, poor education, macroeconomic volatility, and political instability. But new research shows that inequality in the region is falling. In this paper, we...

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...

We apply a standard tax-and-benefit-incidence analysis to estimate the impact on inequality and poverty of direct taxes, indirect taxes and subsidies, and social spending (cash and food transfers and in-kind transfers in education and health). The extent of inequality reduction induced by direct...

Middle class values have long been perceived as drivers of social cohesion and growth. In this paper we investigate the relation between class (measured by the position in the income distribution), values, and political orientations using comparable values surveys for six Latin American...

The provision of life-saving antiretroviral (ARV) treatment has emerged as a key component of the global response to HIV/AIDS, yet little is known about the impact of this intervention on the welfare of children whose parents receive treatment. In this working paper CGD post-doctoral fellow...