We review the origins of the dollar-a-day poverty line, discuss historical poverty and inequality trends, and forecast poverty rates until 2030 using a new fractional response approach. Three findings stand out. First, global poverty reduction since 1981 has been rapid but regional trends are...

The pace of poverty reduction through growth vs. redistribution is at the heart of current debates on equitable development. In this paper, we argue that empirical poverty decompositions should build in the inherent boundedness of the poverty headcount ratio directly. As a solution, we propose a...