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Poverty Comparisons
First published in 1994. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
The Economics of Poverty
"An overview of the economic development of and policies intended to combat poverty around the world"--
Poverty Comparisons
Poverty assessments are typically clouded in conceptual and methodological uncertainties. How should living standards be assessed? Is a household survey necessary, and is it a reliable guide? Where should the poverty line be drawn, and does the choice matter? What poverty measure should be used in aggregating data on individual living standards? Does that choice matter? This paper surveys the issues that need to be considered in answering these questions, and discusses a number of new tools of analysis which can greatly facilitate poverty comparisons, recognizing the uncertainties involved. Various applications in poverty assessment and policy evaluation for developing countries are used to show how these methods can be put into practice. Recommendations are made for future applied work.
The Economics of Poverty
There are fewer people living in extreme poverty in the world today than 30 years ago. While that is an achievement, continuing progress for poor people is far from assured. Inequalities in access to key resources threaten to stall growth and poverty reduction in many places. The world's poorest have made only a small absolute gain over those 30 years. Progress has been slow against relative poverty as judged by the standards of the country and time one lives in, and a great many people in the world's emerging middle class remain vulnerable to falling back into poverty. The Economics of Poverty reviews critically past and present debates on poverty, spanning both rich and poor countries. The...
What Can We Learn about Country Performance from Conditional Comparisons Across Countries?
Existing methods for assessing latent country or institutional performance can yield deceptive results.
Targeted Transfers in Poor Countries
Two tradeoffs have been widely seen to severely constrain the scope for attacking poverty using redistributive transfers in poor countries: An equity-efficiency tradeoff and an insurance-efficiency tradeoff. Ravallion provides a critical overview of recent theoretical and empirical work that has called into question the extent of these tradeoffs in poor countries. He argues that these aggregate tradeoffs are often exaggerated. Indeed, they may not even be binding constraints in practice, given market failures. There appears to be scope for using carefully designed transfer schemes as an effective tool against both transient and chronic poverty. However, the same factors that weaken the tradeoffs also suggest that efficient redistributive policies might look rather different to the programs often found in practice. This paper - a product of the Poverty Team, Development Research Group - is part of a larger effort in the group to better understand the tradeoffs faced in development policymaking.
Rich and Powerful?
Does "empowerment" come hand-in-hand with higher economic welfare? In theory, higher income is likely to raise both power and welfare, but heterogeneity in other characteristics and household formation can either strengthen or weaken the relationship. Survey data on Russian adults indicate that higher individual and household incomes raise both self-rated power and welfare. The individual income effect is primarily direct, rather than through higher household income. There are diminishing returns to income, though income inequality emerges as only a minor factor reducing either aggregate power or welfare. At given income, the identified covariates have strikingly similar effects on power and welfare. There are some notable differences between men and women in perceived power. This paper--a product of the Poverty Team, Development Research Group--is part of a larger effort in the group to explore broader measures of well-being. The authors may be contacted at mlokshin@worldbank.org or mravallion@worldbank.org.
On the Contribution of Demographic Change to Aggregate Poverty Measures for the Developing World
Recent literature and new data help determine plausible bounds to some key demographic differences between the poor and non-poor in the developing world. The author estimates that selective mortality-whereby poorer people tend to have higher death rates-accounts for 10-30 percent of the developing world's trend rate of "$1 a day" poverty reduction in the 1990s. However, in a neighborhood of plausible estimates, differential fertility-whereby poorer people tend also to have higher birth rates-has had a more than offsetting poverty-increasing effect. The net impact of differential natural population growth represents 10-50 percent of the trend rate of poverty reduction.
Growth, Inequality and Poverty
One side in the current debate about who benefits from growth has focused solely on average impacts on poverty and inequality, while the other side has focused on the diverse welfare impacts found beneath the averages. Both sides have a point.
