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 book provides an accessible new synthesis of current economic thinking on key questions: How is poverty measured? How much poverty is there? Why does poverty exist, and is it inevitable? What can be done to reduce poverty? Can it even be eliminated? The book does not assume that readers know economics already. Those new to the subject get a lot of help along the way in understanding its concepts and methods. Economics lives through its relevance to real world problems, and here the problem of poverty is both the central focus and a vehicle for learning.
Abstract: December 1999 - Nonfarm economic growth in India had very different effects on poverty in different states. Nonfarm growth was least effective at reducing poverty in states where initial conditions were poor in terms of rural development and human resources. Among initial conditions conducive to pro-poor growth, literacy plays a notably positive role. Ravallion and Datt use 20 household surveys for India's 15 major states, spanning 1960-94, to study how initial conditions and the sectoral composition of economic growth interact to influence how much economic growth reduced poverty. The elasticities of measured poverty to farm yields and development spending did not differ significantly across states. But the elasticities of poverty to (urban and rural) nonfarm output varied appreciably, and the differences were quantitatively important to the overall rate of poverty reduction. States with initially lower farm productivity, lower rural living standards relative to those in urban areas, and lower literacy experienced a less pro-poor growth process. This paper - a joint product of Poverty and Human Resources, Development Research Group, and the Poverty Reduction and Economic Management Sector Unit, South Asia Region - is part of a larger effort in the Bank to better understand the conditions required for pro-poor growth. The authors may be contacted at mravallion@worldbank.org or gdatt@worldbank.org.
A poverty line helps focus the attention of governments and civil society on the living conditions of the poor. This paper offers a critical overview of alternative approaches to setting poverty lines. In reviewing the methods found in practice, the paper tries to throw light on, and go some way toward resolving, ongoing debates about poverty measurement, emphasizing those debates which would appear to have greatest bearing on policy discussions.
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