The article presents the first major update of the international $1 a day poverty line, proposed in World Development Report 1990: Poverty for measuring absolute poverty by the standards of the world's poorest countries. In a new and more representative data set of national poverty lines, a...

The article assesses the impact of Argentina's main social policy response to the severe economic crisis of 2002. The program was intended to provide direct income support for families with dependent sand whose head had become unemployed because of the crisis. Counter factual comparisons are...

We know surprisingly little about the long-run impacts of household electrification. This paper studies the impacts on consumption in rural India over a 17-year period, allowing for both internal and external (village-level) effects. Under our identifying assumptions, electrification brought...

Many more impact evaluations could be done, and at lower unit cost, if evaluators could avoid the need for baseline data using objective socio-economic surveys and rely instead on retrospective subjective questions on how outcomes have changed, asked post-intervention. But would the results be...

The extent to which India's poor have benefited from the country's economic growth has long been debated. A new series of consumption-based poverty measures spanning 50 years, including a 15-year period after economic reforms began in earnest in the early 1990s, is used to examine that issue....

This article provides an introduction to the concepts and methods of impact evaluation. The author provides an intuitive explanation in the context of a concrete application. The article takes the form of a short story about a fictional character's on-the-job training in evaluation. Ms. Speedy...

Data from China's national rural and urban household surveys are used to measure and explain the welfare impacts of changes in goods and factor prices attributable to accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO). The price changes are estimated separately using a general equilibrium model to...

Why do richer countries spend a higher share of their income on social protection than poor countries A newly assembled dataset on social protection spending for 142 countries since 1995 allows an exploration of alternate hypotheses, treating the pandemic period separately, as it entailed a...

It has been claimed that in recent times the poor have lost ground, both relatively and absolutely, even when average levels of living have risen. This article tests that claim using household surveys for 67 developing and transitional economies over 1981-94. It finds that changes in inequality...

Using a new series of consistent, consumption-based poverty measures spanning forty years, we assess how much India's poor shared in the country's economic growth, taking into account its urban-rural and output composition. Rural consumption growth reduced poverty in both rural and urban areas....