Both chronic and transient poverty are reduced by greater command over physical capital, and life-cycle effects for the two types of poverty are similar. But there the similarities end. Most policies aimed at reducing chronic poverty may have little or no effect on transient poverty. Are the...

Can location make the difference between growth and contraction in living standards for otherwise identical households? Apparently so. Evidence of spatial poverty traps strengthens the case for investing in the geographic capital of poor people. Can place of residence make the difference between...

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...

Brazil, China and India have seen falling poverty in their reform periods, but to varying degrees and for different reasons. History left China with favorable initial conditions for rapid poverty reduction through market-led economic growth; at the outset of the reform process there were ample...

Word searches of Google's library of digitized books suggest that there have been two “Poverty Enlightenments” since 1700, one near the end of the 18th century and the second near the end of the 20th. The historical literature suggests that only the second came with a widespread belief that...