A poverty line helps focus the attention of governments and civil society on the living conditions of the poor. In practice, there is typically not one monetary poverty line but many, reflecting the fact that poverty lines serve two distinct role. One role is to determine what the minimum level...

Economists often advise governments to target their spending better when cuts are called for. This paper asks whether that advice is consistent with a political-economy constraint that limits the welfare losses to the non-poor from spending cuts. A simple theoretical model shows that the answer...

The idea that developing countries face a trade off between poverty and inequality has had considerable influence on thinking about development policy. The experience of developing countries in the 1990s does not, however, reveal any sign of a systematic trade off between measures of absolute...