The authors investigate the methodology used in projections of international poverty - particularly those used in many World Bank documents. The methodology, as developed by Ahluwalia, Carter, and Chenery (1979) in an influential paper, is examined critically and subjected to sensitivity...

This paper reviews recent developments in the measurement of poverty, analyzes alternative strategies for poverty alleviation, and suggests a methodology for evaluating the impact of macroeconomic adjustment on poverty. The paper begins with the conceptual basis of alternative poverty lines and...

A central question for policy makers concerned with helping the poor through a macro crisis is how to target scarcer resources at a time of greater need. Technical arguments suggest that finer targeting through tightening individual programs or reallocation resources towards more tightly...

In the last two decades, across a range of countries high growth rates have reduced poverty but have been accompanied by rising inequality. This paper is motivated by this stylized fact, and by the strong distributional concerns that persist among populations and policy makers alike, despite the...

In an economy with migration, poverty changes are composed of a number of forces, including the income gains and losses realized by the various migration streams. We present a simple but powerful decomposition methodology that uses panel data to measure the contributions of different migration...