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This article reviews trends in poverty, economic policies, and growth in a sample of African countries during the 1990s, drawing on the better household data now available. Experiences have varied. Some countries have seen sharp drops in income poverty, whereas others have witnessed marked increases. In some countries overall economic growth has been pro-poor and in others not. But the aggregate numbers hide systematic distributional effects. Taking both macro and micro perspectives of growth and poverty in Africa, the article draws four key conclusions. First, economic policy reforms (improving macroeconomic balances and liberalizing markets) appear conducive to reducing poverty. Second, market connectedness is crucial to enable participation in the gains from economic growth. Some regions and households by virtue of their remoteness were left behind when growth picked up. Third, education and access to land emerge as key private endowments to help households benefit from new economic opportunities. Finally, rainfall variations and ill health have profound effects on poverty outcomes, underscoring the significance of social risk management in poverty reduction strategies in Africa.

Strong poverty reduction in Latin America resumed with the growth rebound in 2010, as both moderate and extreme poor households benefitted from the recovery, accelerating poverty reduction to rates similar to those witnessed between 2003-2006 despite a 2.8 percent decline in Gross Domestic Product (GDP) per capita in Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) terms, poverty levels in Latin America (LAC) remained basically static during the great recession, as the poor were shielded from the economic crisis in some countries and continued to benefit from growth in others. In 2010, poverty reduction resumed sharply in Latin America, as household incomes were once again closely linked to economic growth at rates similar to pre-crisis years. Moderate poverty declined by almost 2.5 percentage points to reach 28 percent in 2010, while extreme poverty fell by more than 2 percentage points to reach 14 percent. As 2011 comes to a close, once again the global economy and Latin America are facing risks of yet another economic slowdown. Using household survey data from 2010 and selected labor market indicators through the third quarter of 2011, this note identifies some basic facts on the impact of the crisis and the recovery on the poor and explores their implications for poverty reduction in the region going forward.

This paper assesses the potential impacts of the removal of agricultural and other trade distortions using a newly developed dataset and methodological approach for evaluating the global poverty and inequality effects of policy reforms. It finds that liberalization of agriculture will increase global extreme poverty (US$1 a day) slightly and by almost 1 percent if other goods trade is also liberalized; but the number of people living on less than $2 a day will fall by almost 1 percent. Beneath these small aggregate changes, most countries witness a substantial reduction in poverty while South Asia where half of the world's poor reside will experience an increase in extreme (but not moderate) poverty incidence due to high rates of protection afforded to its unskilled labor-intensive agricultural sectors. The distributional changes also are projected to be mild, but again exhibit a strong regional pattern: inequality falls in Latin America, which is characterized by high initial inequality, and rises in South Asia, has relatively low income inequality.

When the World Bank dreams of 'a world free of poverty,' what should it be dreaming? In measuring global income or consumption expenditure poverty, the World Bank has widely adopted the $1 a day standard as a lower bound. Because this standard is based on poverty lines in the poorest countries, anyone with income or expenditures below this line will truly be poor. But there is no consensus standard for the upper bound of the global poverty line: above what level of income or expenditures is someone truly not poor? This article proposes that the World Bank compute its lower and upper bounds in a methodologically equivalent way, using the poverty lines of the poorest countries for the lower bound and the poverty lines of the richest countries for the upper bound. The resulting upper bound global poverty line will be 10 times higher than the current lower bound and at least 5 times higher than the currently used alternative lower bound of $2 a day. And in tracking progress toward a world free of poverty, the World Bank should compute measures of global poverty using a variety of weights on the depth and intensity of poverty for a range of poverty lines between the global lower and upper bounds. For instance, rather than trying to artificially force the global population of 6.2 billion (a billion is 1,000 million) into just two categories 'poor' and 'not poor,' with the new range of poverty lines the estimates would be that 1.3 billion people are 'destitute' (below $1 a day), another 1.6 billion are in 'extreme poverty' (above $1 a day but below $2 dollar a day), and another 2.5 billion are in 'global poverty' (above extreme poverty but below the upper bound poverty line).