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...

The fraction of workers currently covered by minimum wages in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) is small, but as formality and urbanization increase, wage regulation will become increasingly relevant. In this analysis, we find that higher minimum wage values are associated with higher levels of GDP per...

This paper looks at the recent trends of rising inequality in developing Asia, asks why inequality matters, examines the driving forces of rising inequality, and proposes policy options for tackling high and rising inequality. Technological change, globalization, and market-oriented reform have...

This paper looks at the recent trends of rising inequality in developing Asia, asks why inequality matters, examines the driving forces of rising inequality, and proposes policy options for tackling high and rising inequality. Technological change, globalization, and market-oriented reform have...

This paper looks at the recent trends of rising inequality in developing Asia, asks why inequality matters, examines the driving forces of rising inequality, and proposes policy options for tackling high and rising inequality. Technological change, globalization, and market-oriented reform have...

This paper provides a quantitative analysis of how the changing dual economic structure and urbanization affect inequality in Asia. Focusing on data for four countries—the Peoples’ Republic of China, India, Indonesia, and the Philippines—the paper asks three questions. First, how much of...