Standard methods of impact evaluation often leave significant gaps between what we know about development effectiveness and what we want to know—gaps that stem from distortions in the market for knowledge. The author discusses how evaluations might better address these knowledge gaps and so be...

Policy-oriented discussions often assume that "better targeting" implies larger impacts on poverty or more cost-effective interventions for fighting poverty. The literature on the economics of targeting warns against that assumption, but evidence has been scarce and the lessons from the...

Brazil, China, and India have seen falling poverty in their reform periods, but to varying degrees and for different reasons. History left China with favorable initial conditions for rapid poverty reduction through market-led economic growth; at the outset of the reform process there were many...

Countries are increasingly being ranked by some new “mashup index of development,” defined as a composite index for which existing theory and practice provides little or no guidance for its design. Thus the index has an unusually large number of moving parts, which the producer is...

A new assessment is made of the developing world’s progress against poverty. By the frugal $1 a day standard there were 1.1 billion poor people in 2001—almost 400 million fewer than 20 years earlier. During that period the number of poor people declined by more than 400 million in China,...

Alternative scenarios are considered for reducing by one billion the number of people surviving on less than $1.25 a day. The low-case, “pessimistic” path to that goal envisages the developing world outside China returning to the slower pace of economic growth and poverty reduction of the...

This issue provides a usefully critical discussion of the current methods used by the World Bank for measuring poverty. The author will not address all the points raised by Deaton- avoiding those on which the author thinks there is broad agreement that the World Bank s current methods can be...

Standard methods of impact evaluation often leave significant gaps between what we know about development effectiveness and what we want to know--gaps that stem from distortions in the market for knowledge. The author discusses how evaluations might better address these knowledge gaps and so be...

No one doubts the good data are essential to sound policymaking. Alas, data are invariably faulty. Methodological solutions to data inadequacies have often been proposed and implemented, but they have been tested only rarely. Yet the methods that are used may well determine the direction of...

With the limited set of policy instruments typically available in the rural sectors of developing countries, imperfect coverage of the poor and leakage to the nonpoor must be expected from even the most well-intentioned poverty alleviation scheme, One way to reach the poor more effectively is to...