Martin Ravallion ("Why Don't We See Poverty Convergence?" American Economic Review, 102(1): 504-23; 2012) presents evidence against the existence of proportionate convergence in global poverty rates despite convergence in household mean income levels and the link between income growth and poverty...

Some authors argue that it is enough to focus on growth to achieve lower poverty and greater shared prosperity. Policy-makers are warned that any effort to make growth more equal would be a distraction at best and could even be detrimental. Achieving the World Bank target of a 3% poverty rate by...

This paper discusses the rationale as well as the challenges involved when constructing gender-related indicators of well-being. It argues that such indicators are critically important but that their construction involved a number of conceptual and measurement problems. Among the conceptual...

This paper critically reviews the recent changes to the Global Poverty numbers generated by the World Bank in 2008. While they have little impact on observed poverty trends and while there are good reasons to believe that the previous numbers were on weak foundations, the new numbers on levels...