By the widely used difference-in-difference method, the Southwest China Poverty Reduction Project had little impact on the proportion of people in beneficiary villages consuming less than $1 a day-despite a public outlay of $400 million. Is that right, or is the true impact being hidden somehow?...

The authors present new estimates of the extent of the developing world's progress against poverty. By the frugal $1 a day standard, they find that there were 1.1 billion poor in 2001-almost 400 million fewer than 20 years earlier. Over the same period, the number of poor declined by more than...

The authors used distribution data from 109 household surveys done since 1980 in 42 developing and transitional economies to find evidence that high rates of growth in average living standards are associated with higher rates of poverty reduction. The adverse distributional effect of recent...

The authors use China's national household surveys for rural and urban areas to measure and explain the welfare impacts of the changes in goods and factor prices attributed to WTO accession. Price changes are estimated separately using a general equilibrium model to capture both direct and...

The paper presents the first major update of the international"$1 a day"poverty line, first proposed in 1990 for measuring absolute poverty by the standards of the world's poorest countries. In a new data set of national povertylines we find that a marked economic gradient only emerges when...

In 2005, China participated for the first time in the International Comparison Program (ICP), which collects primary data across countries on the prices for an internationally comparable list of goods and services. This paper examines the implications of the new Purchasing Power Parity (PPP)...

The authors provide new evidence on the extent to which absolute poverty has urbanized in the developing world, and the role that population urbanization has played in overall poverty reduction. They find that one-quarter of the world's consumption poor live in urban areas and that the...

While the incidence of extreme poverty in China fell dramatically over 1980-2001, progress was uneven over time and across provinces. Rural areas accounted for the bulk of the gains to the poor, though migration to urban areas helped. The pattern of growth mattered. Rural economic growth was far...

It is important to know how aggregate economic growth or contraction was distributed according to initial levels of living. In particular, to what extent can it be said that growth was"pro-poor?"There are problems with past methods of addressing this question, notably that the measures used are...

Drawing on data from 265 national sample surveys spanning 83 countries, the authors find that there was a net decrease in the total incidence of consumption poverty between 1987 and 1998. But it was not enough to reduce the total number of poor people, by various definitions. The incidence of...