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This paper provides an overview of poverty and well-being trends in India since the mid-1990s. Poverty reduction since 2005 has been much faster than the earlier decade, as a result of broad-based growth across most geographic areas. Underlying this is a pattern of high mobility in economic status that has led to an emerging middle class. Still, a vast (and rising) share of the population faces significant risk of slipping back into poverty. India's poor are increasingly concentrated in low-income states with historically lower rates of economic progress. Even as India has reduced poverty faster than the developing world as a whole, the degree of poverty reduction associated with growth has been substantially lower than in some of its middle-income peers. India faces important challenges in nonmonetary dimensions of welfare as well. Despite success on important fronts, such as infant and child mortality and secondary education, progress has been slow in others, such as sanitation and nutrition, and lags behind some other countries that are at a similar stage of development.

In the 20th Century, Brazil rapidly urbanized and is now not only an urban nation but a metropolitan one. Brazils sprawling regioes metropolitanas (metropolitan regions, or RMs, which are municipal clusters) are now home to almost 50 million people and much of the countrys economic vitality. The RM spatial level and its supporting governmental institutions have thus become critical to Brazils future development. While challenges remain for tackling deprivation in rural areas, poverty in Brazil is now predominantly urban. More than six in 10 Brazilians in extreme poverty were living in urban settings as of 2012. Of these, over a fourth was concentrated in the 10 largest RMs.

This report examines Armenia’s experience in reducing poverty and raising the welfare of the least well-off in the country in the years since 2009. What households spend on consumption is an indicator of their welfare. As the economy recovered from crisis, the least well-off enjoyed some growth in consumption spending, but not as much as in the years up to 2009. Moreover, growth has become less pro-poor in relative terms because the less well-off enjoyed lower growth in consumption than the better-off. As a result, although consumption did translate into a reduction in poverty, inequality is now higher than before 2009. In 2013, 32 percent of Armenia’s population lived below the national poverty line, a poverty rate higher than in pre-crisis years but down from the high of 35.8 percent in 2010. In fact, between 2012 and 2013, poverty reduction seems to have stalled. This report looks at the micro and macro aspects of Armenia’s poverty reduction experience to: (a) describe the key features of post-crisis poverty, inequality, and consumption growth; (b) examine the drivers of poverty reduction in this period; and (c) explore reasons why future growth might not be as pro-poor as in the past.

This paper proposes a new measure of growth in shared prosperity, based on shifts in population shares of different income groups over time. This measure complements the definition of shared prosperity recently proposed by the World Bank in which income growth of the bottom 40 percent is examined. The new measure’s strengths arise from its close ties to countries’ national poverty lines and poverty measures, its focus on inclusion of the vulnerable population, and its identification of a population segment that is neither poor nor at significant risk of falling into poverty. The paper also offers a typology of scenarios for tracking shared prosperity under this measure. It provides illustrative examples using survey data from India, the United States, and Vietnam for the mid-to-late 2000s. Estimation results comparing the two approaches with measuring the evolution of shared prosperity are qualitatively consistent, and suggest that during this period, Vietnam enjoyed the greatest expansion in shared prosperity, followed by India and then the United States.

With the recent release of the 2011 purchasing power parity (PPP) data from the International Comparison Program (ICP), analysts and institutions are confronted with the question of whether and how to use them for global poverty estimation. The previous round of PPP data from 2005 led to a large increase in the estimated number of poor in the world. The 2011 price data suggest that developing countries’ incomes in PPP-adjusted dollars are significantly higher than indicated by the 2005 PPP data. This has created the anticipation that the new PPP data will decrease significantly the count of poor people in the world. This paper presents evidence that if the global poverty line is updated with the 2011 PPP data based on the same set of national poverty lines that define the $1.25 line in 2005 PPPs, and if the 2011 PPP conversion factors are used without adjustments to selected countries, the 2011 poverty rate is within half a percentage point of the current global estimate based on 2005 PPPs. The analysis also indicates that the goal of ‘ending’ extreme poverty by 2030 continues to be an ambitious one.

What happened to poverty in India in the 1990s has been fiercely debated, both politically and statistically. The debate has run parallel to the wider debate about globalization and poverty in the 1990s and is also an important part of that debate. The economic reforms of the early 1990s in India were followed by rates of economic growth that were high by historical standards. The effects on poverty remain controversial, however. The official numbers published by the government of India, showing acceleration in the rate of poverty reduction from 36 percent of the population in 1993 to 1994 to 26 percent in 1999 to 2000, have been challenged for showing both too little and too much poverty reduction. The various claims have often been frankly political, but there are also many important statistical issues. The debate, reviewed in this article, provides an excellent example of how politics and statistics interact in an important, largely domestic debate. Although there is no consensus on what happened to poverty in India in the 1990s, there is good evidence both that poverty fell and that the official estimates of poverty reduction are too optimistic, particularly for rural India. The issues covered in this article, although concerned with the measurement of poverty in India, have wide international relevance discrepancies between surveys and national accounts, the effects of questionnaire design, reporting periods, survey nonresponse, repair of imperfect data, choice of poverty lines, and interplay between statistics and politics.

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.

In the last two decades, across a range of countries high growth rates have reduced poverty but have been accompanied by rising inequality. This paper is motivated by this stylized fact, and by the strong distributional concerns that persist among populations and policy makers alike, despite the poverty reduction observed in official statistics where growth has been sufficiently high. This seeming disconnects frames the questions posed in this paper. Why the disconnect, and what to do about it? It is argued that official poverty statistics may be missing key elements of the ground level reality of distributional evolution, of which rising inequality may be an indirect indicator. Heterogeneity of population means that there may be significant numbers of poor losers from technical change, economic reform and global integration, even when overall measured poverty falls. In terms of actions, attention is drawn to the role of safety nets as generalized compensation mechanisms, to address the ethical and political economy dimensions of such a pattern of distributional evolution. Addressing structural inequalities is also a long term answer with payoffs in terms of equitable growth. In terms of future analysis, diminishing returns have set in to the inequality-growth cross-country regressions literature. Further work to help policy makers should focus on: (i) new information to illuminate the disconnect; (ii) analysis and assessment of safety nets as generalized compensation mechanisms; and (iii) addressing specific forms of structural inequality related to assets, gender, and social groupings like caste or ethnicity.

Ghana has done increasingly well in recent years. This report has analyzed these issues in considerable depth, making it a prime reference on Ghana's growth and poverty experience and current policy challenges. The Ghana Country Economic Memorandum (CEM) report presented in these three volumes brings together detailed, relevant analyses of Ghana's growth and the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), poverty reduction, infrastructure, agriculture, investment climate, export competitiveness, social inclusion and political economy.

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).

One of the most contentious issues of globalization is the effect of global economic integration on inequality and poverty. This article documents five trends in the modern era of globalization, starting around 1980. The first trend is that growth rates in poor economies have accelerated and are higher than growth rates in rich countries for the first time in modern history. Developing countries per capita incomes grew more than 3.5 percent a year in the 1990s. Second, the number of extremely poor people in the world has declined significantly. The share of people in developing economies living on less than dollar 1 a day has been cut in half since 1981, though the decline in the share living on less than dollar 2 per day was much less dramatic. Third, global inequality has declined modestly, reversing a 200-year trend toward higher inequality. Fourth, within-country inequality in general is not growing, though it has risen in several populous countries (China, India, and the United States). Fifth, wage inequality is rising worldwide. This may seem to contradict the fourth trend, but it does not because there is no simple link between wage inequality and household income inequality. Furthermore, the trends toward faster growth and poverty reduction are strongest in developing economies that have integrated with the global economy most rapidly, which supports the view that integration has been a positive force for improving the lives of people in developing areas

As recent discussions have made clear, the apparent lack of poverty reduction in the face of historically high rates of economic growth—both in the world as a whole and in specific countries (most notably India)—provides fuel for the argument that economic growth does little to reduce poverty. How confident can we be that the data actually support these inferences? At the international level, the regular revision of purchasing power parity exchange rates plays havoc with the poverty estimates, changing them in ways that have little or nothing to do with the actual experience of the poor. At the domestic level, the problems in measuring poverty are important not only for the world count but also for tracking income poverty within individual countries. Yet, in many countries, there are large and growing discrepancies between the survey data—the source of poverty counts—and the national accounts—the source of the measure of economic growth. Thus economic growth, as measured, has at best a weak relationship with poverty, as measured. The World Bank prepares and publishes estimates of the number of poor people in the world. Although these numbers should be taken with a pinch of salt, they are arguably important. In an institution where the reduction of poverty is the paramount objective, some overall yardstick of progress (or the lack of it) is required. The numbers are frequently quoted by politicians and by leaders of international organizations, including the World Bank itself, who believe the numbers are effective for advocacy. Indeed, there is a long history of studies of poverty mobilizing support among the nonpoor for antipoverty policies. So it is important to know whether the world and national poverty counts are sound enough to support these uses. As recent discussions have made clear, the apparent lack of poverty reduction in the face of historically high rates of economic growth—both in the world as a whole and in specific countries (most notably India)—is providing fuel for the argument that economic growth does little to reduce poverty. How confident can we be that the data actually support these inferences? Are the changes in the poverty counts sufficiently well measured to support conclusions about growth and poverty reduction? Should

Counting the world's poor: problems and possible solutions; by Angus Deaton. Comments on "counting the world's poor"; by Martin Ravallion, and T. N. Srinivasan. Ecology, history, and development : a perspective from rural Southeast Asia; by Yujiro Hayami. Productivity growth and sustainability in post-green revolution agriculture: the case of the Indian and Pakistan Punjab; by Rinku Murgai, Mubarik Ali, and Derek Byerlee. The politics of Russian enterprise reform: insiders, local governments, and the obstacles to restructuring; by Raj M. Desai and Itzhak Goldberg.