The unevenness of the rise in rural living standards in the various states of India since the 1950s allowed the authors to study the causes of poverty. They modeled the evolution of average consumption and various poverty measures using pooled state-level data for 1957-91. They found that...

The extent to which India's poor have benefited from the country’s economic growth has long been debated. This paper revisits the issues using a new series of consumption-based poverty measures spanning 50 years, and including a 15-year period after economic reforms began in earnest in the...

The authors assess the developing world's progress in reducing absolute-consumption poverty during 1981-91, using new data on the distribution of household consumption or income per capita for 40 countries (at two points in time for 18 of the countries). They apply dominance tests to the...

In counting the poor, and measuring the severity of absolute poverty, one faces a number of difficult questions. What poverty line should be used? Should one use the same poverty line across all countries? How should one adjust for differences across countries in the purchasing power of their...

Using household survey data for 1998, the authors assess the distributional impact of the recent economic crisis in the Philippines. The results suggest that the impact of the crisis was modest, leading to a five percent reduction in average living standards, and a nine percent increase in the...

Empirical studies of tax and benefit incidence routinely ignore behavioral responses and measurement errors. This paper offers an econometric method of estimating the mean benefit withdrawal rate (marginal tax rate) allowing for incentive effects, measurement errors, and correlated latent...

Against what standards should we judge the developing world's overall performance against poverty going forward? The paper proposes two measures, each with both"optimistic"and"ambitious"targets for 2022, 10 years from the time of writing. The first measure is absolute consumption poverty, as...

We are not seeing faster progress against poverty amongst the poorest developing countries. Yet this is implied by widely accepted"stylized facts"about the development process. The paper tries to explain what is missing from those stylized facts. Consistently with models of economic growth...

Development aid and policy discussions often assume that poorer countries have less internal capacity for redistribution in favor of their poorest citizens. The assumption is tested using data for 90 developing countries. The capacity for redistribution is measured by the marginal tax rate on...

Concerns about incentives and targeting naturally arise when cash transfers are used to fight poverty. The authors address these concerns in the context of China's Di Bao program, which uses means-tested transfers to try to assure that no registered urban resident has an income below a...