Measuring pro-poor growth

It is important to know how aggregate economic growth or contraction was distributed according to initial levels of living. In particular, to what extent can it be said that growth was"pro-poor?"There are problems with past methods of addressing this question, notably that the measures used are inconsistent with the properties that are considered desirable for a measure of the level of poverty. The authors provide some new tools for assessing to what extent the aggregate growth process in an economy is pro-poor. The key measurement tools is the"growth incidence curve,"which gives growth rates by quantiles (such as percentiles) ranked by income. Taking the area under this curve up to the headcount index of poverty gives a measure of the rate of pro-poor growth consistent with the Watts index for the level of poverty. The authors give examples using survey data for China during the 1990s. Over 1990-99, the ordinary growth rate of household income per capita in China was 7 percent a year. The growth rate by quantile varied from 3 percent for the poorest percentile to 11 percent for the richest, while the rate of pro-poor growth was around 4 percent. The pattern was reversed for a few years in the mid-1990s, when the rate of pro-poor growth rose to 10 percent a year--above the ordinary growth rate of 8 percent.Poverty Reduction Strategies,Economic Conditions and Volatility,Public Health Promotion,Services&Transfers to Poor,Health Monitoring&Evaluation,Achieving Shared Growth,Governance Indicators,Economic Conditions and Volatility,Inequality,Health Monitoring&Evaluation

How Have the World's Poorest Fared Since the Early 1980s?

The authors present new estimates of the extent of the developing world's progress against poverty. By the frugal $1 a day standard, they find that there were 1.1 billion poor in 2001-almost 400 million fewer than 20 years earlier. Over the same period, the number of poor declined by more than 400 million in China, though half of this decline was in the first few years of the 1980s. The number of poor outside China rose slightly over the period. A marked bunching up of people between$1 and $2 a day has also emerged. Sub-Saharan Africa has become the region with the highest incidence of extreme poverty and the greatest depth of poverty. If these trends continue, then the aggregate$1 a day poverty rate for 1990 will be halved by 2015, though only East and South Asia will reach this goal.Environmental Economics&Policies,Poverty Reduction Strategies,Health Economics&Finance,Services&Transfers to Poor,Poverty Monitoring&Analysis,Poverty Assessment,Achieving Shared Growth,Services&Transfers to Poor,Rural Poverty Reduction,Safety Nets and Transfers

How did the world's poorest fare in the 1990s ?

Drawing on data from 265 national sample surveys spanning 83 countries, the authors find that there was a net decrease in the total incidence of consumption poverty between 1987 and 1998. But it was not enough to reduce the total number of poor people, by various definitions. The incidence of poverty fell in Asia and the Middle East and North Africa, changed little in Latin America and Sub-Saharan Africa, and rose in Eastern Europe and Central Asia. The two main proximate causes of the disappointing rate of poverty reduction: too little economic growth in many of the poorest countries, and persistent inequalities (in both income and other essential measures) that kept the poor from participating in the growth that did occur.Economic Conditions and Volatility,Environmental Economics&Policies,Poverty Reduction Strategies,Services&Transfers to Poor,Earth Sciences&GIS,Poverty Assessment,Achieving Shared Growth,Inequality,Environmental Economics&Policies,Rural Poverty Reduction

When economic reform is faster than statistical reform - measuring and explaining inequality in rural China

Official tabulations from household survey data suggest rising income inequality in post-reform rural China, a trend of public concern. But the structural changes in China's rural economy have not been properly reflected in the methods used to process raw survey data. Using micro data from four provinces, the authors find that two-thirds of the conventionally measured increase in inequality in 1985-90 vanishes when market-based valuation methods are used and allowances are made for regional cost-of-living differences. The data revisions also suggest somewhat different explanations for rising inequality. Nonfarm income was secondary to grain production. While access to farm land was relatively equal, higher returns to land over time were inequality-increasing. But holding other factors constant, lower returns to physical capital reduced inequality over time, as did private transfers.Economic Theory&Research,Poverty Impact Evaluation,Services&Transfers to Poor,Environmental Economics&Policies,Labor Policies,Services&Transfers to Poor,Rural Poverty Reduction,Inequality,Poverty Impact Evaluation,Safety Nets and Transfers

Hidden impact ? Ex-post evaluation of an anti-poverty program

By the widely used difference-in-difference method, the Southwest China Poverty Reduction Project had little impact on the proportion of people in beneficiary villages consuming less than $1 a day-despite a public outlay of$400 million. Is that right, or is the true impact being hidden somehow? The authors find that impact estimates are quite sensitive to the choice of outcome indicator, the poverty line, and the matching method. There are larger poverty impacts at lower poverty lines. And there are much larger impacts on incomes than consumptions. Uncertainty about the impact probably made it hard for participants to infer the gain in permanent income, so they saved ahigh proportion of the short-term gain.Poverty Monitoring&Analysis,Economic Theory&Research,Poverty Impact Evaluation,Environmental Economics&Policies,Health Economics&Finance,Environmental Economics&Policies,Poverty Monitoring&Analysis,Inequality,Economic Theory&Research,Poverty Impact Evaluation

What can new survey data tell us about recent changes in distribution and poverty?

The authors used distribution data from 109 household surveys done since 1980 in 42 developing and transitional economies to find evidence that high rates of growth in average living standards are associated with higher rates of poverty reduction. The adverse distributional effect of recent growth in a number of developing countries has not been strong enough to change the conclusion that growth has benefited the poor. For the developing countries as a whole, there is no significant trend in distributional effect for or against the poor. Overall there was a small decrease in poverty incidence in 1987-93, though experiences differed across regions and countries. There was no general tendency for inequality or polarization to increase with growth. Distribution improves as often as it worsens in growing economies, and negative growth often appears to be highly detrimental to distribution. Poor people typically do share in rising average living standards. This holds in all regions. Turning to performance in reducing absolute poverty, the authors calculated the rates of change in the proportions of the population living on less than 50 percent, 75 percent, and 100 percent of the initial survey mean for each country. In East Asia, poverty fell in most cases, while it rose in almost all cases in Eastern Europe and Central Asia. Poverty also mainly rose in Africa and it rose in South Asia and Latin America about as often as it fell. Other results discussed include population percentage changes for those in poverty and the percentage change in the depth of poverty.Services&Transfers to Poor,Poverty Monitoring&Analysis,Economic Conditions and Volatility,Environmental Economics&Policies,Health Economics&Finance,Achieving Shared Growth,Poverty Assessment,Inequality,Governance Indicators,Safety Nets and Transfers

The changing profile of poverty in the world:

Poverty, Hunger, Urban and Rural Poverty, Poverty dynamics, Measuring Poverty, Poverty reduction, 2020 Conference, Millennium Development Goals, Urban-rural differences, Regional development, Rural development,

Weakly relative poverty

Prevailing measures of relative poverty put an implausibly high weight on relative deprivation, such that measured poverty does not fall when all incomes grow at the same rate. This stems from the (implicit) assumption in past measures that very poor people incur a negligible cost of social inclusion. That assumption is inconsistent with evidence on the social roles of certain private expenditures in poor settings and with data on national poverty lines. The authors propose a new schedule of"weakly relative"lines that relax this assumption and estimate the implied poverty measures for 116 developing countries. The authors find that there is more relative poverty than past estimates have suggested. In 2005, one half of the population of the developing world lived in relative poverty, half of whom were absolutely poor. The total number of relatively poor rose over 1981-2005, despite falling numbers of absolutely poor. With sustained economic growth, the incidence of relative poverty becomes less responsive to further growth. Slower progress against relative poverty can thus be seen as the"other side of the coin"to success against absolute poverty.Rural Poverty Reduction,Population Policies,Achieving Shared Growth,Services&Transfers to Poor

The developing world is poorer than we thought, but no less successful in the fight against poverty

The paper presents a major overhaul to the World Bank's past estimates of global poverty, incorporating new and better data. Extreme poverty-as judged by what"poverty"means in the world's poorest countries-is found to be more pervasive than we thought. Yet the data also provide robust evidence of continually declining poverty incidence and depth since the early 1980s. For 2005 we estimate that 1.4 billion people, or one quarter of the population of the developing world, lived below our international line of $1.25 a day in 2005 prices; 25 years earlier there were 1.9 billion poor, or one half of the population. Progress was uneven across regions. The poverty rate in East Asia fell from almost 80 percent to under 20 percent over this period. By contrast it stayed at around 50 percent in Sub-Saharan Africa, though with signs of progress since the mid 1990s. Because of lags in survey data availability, these estimates do not yet reflect the sharp rise in food prices since 2005.Rural Poverty Reduction,Regional Economic Development,Achieving Shared Growth,Services&Transfers to Poor

China is poorer than we thought, but no less successful in the fight against poverty

In 2005, China participated for the first time in the International Comparison Program (ICP), which collects primary data across countries on the prices for an internationally comparable list of goods and services. This paper examines the implications of the new Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) rate (derived by the ICP) for China's poverty rate (by international standards) and how it has changed over time. We provide estimates with and without adjustment for a likely sampling bias in the ICP data. Using an international poverty line of USD 1.25 at 2005 PPP, we find a substantially higher poverty rate for China than past estimates, with about 15% of the population living in consumption poverty, implying about 130 million more poor by this standard. The income poverty rate in 2005 is 10%, implying about 65 million more people living in poverty. However, the new ICP data suggest an even larger reduction in the number of poor since 1981.Rural Poverty Reduction,Population Policies,Achieving Shared Growth,ICT Applications