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 “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....

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...

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...

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...

The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) are widely cited as the primary yardstick against which advances in international development efforts are to be judged. At the same time, the Goals will be met or missed by 2015. It is not too early to start asking ‘what next?’ This paper builds on a...

Smart decisions about where to focus poverty alleviation projects depend on accurate projections of where the bulk of the world’s poor will be living in 10, 20 years or more. So far, though, the picture has been murky. Data limitations and an abundance of modeling strategies complicate...