The International Comparison Program (ICP) has become not only the largest international statistical program in the world, but also the most complex. In the years leading up to 2005, six rounds of the...
Temporal deflators are needed to compare welfare aggregates over time, and thus to measure real changes in poverty. This note describes the sources of the consumer price indices that are used for every...
The September 2018 update to PovcalNet involves several changes to the dataunderlying the global poverty estimates. Some welfare aggregates have been changed forimproved harmonization, and some of the...
The April 2018 update to PovcalNet involves several changes to the data underlying the global poverty estimates. Some welfare aggregates have been changed for improved harmonization, some surveys have...
The paper provides new measures of global poverty that take seriously the idea of relative-income comparisons but also acknowledge a deep identification problem when the latent norms defining poverty...
Growth in developing East Asia and Pacific (EAP) continues to be resilient and in line with previous expectations. Already robust domestic demand has been supported by some pickup in external demand...
In the six months since the previous East Asia and Pacific (EAP) economic update, developing EAP has faced a challenging external environment. Financial market conditions in the region, however, have...
The 2014 release of a new set of purchasing power parity conversion factors (PPPs) for 2011 has prompted a revision of the international poverty line. In order to preserve the integrity of the goalposts...
The 2014 release of a new set of purchasing power parity conversion factors (PPPs) for 2011 has prompted a revision of the international poverty line. In order to preserve the integrity of the goalposts...
Although poverty reduction has been a mainstay of its work for decades, the World Bank has for the first time, committed to a specific poverty reduction target to guide its work. Similarly, the goal...
The International Comparison Program (ICP) has become not only the largest international statistical program in the world, but also the most complex. In the years leading up to 2005, six rounds of the...
Prevailing measures of relative poverty are unchanged when all incomes grow or contract by the same proportion. This property stems from seemingly implausible assumptions about the disutility of relative...
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)...
This issue includes the following: dollar a day revisited, by Martin Ravallion, Shaohua Chen, and Prem Sangraula; evidence on changes in aid allocation criteria, by Stijn Claessens, Danny Cassimon...
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...
The paper revisits the site of a large, World Bank-financed, rural development program in China 10 years after it began and four years after disbursements ended. The program emphasized community participation...
This paper probes into the empirical roots of the debate as to whether poverty is now indeed mainly an urban problem. It aims to throw new light on the extent to which poverty is in fact urbanizing...
Concerns about incentives and targeting naturally arise when cash transfers are used to fight poverty. The authors address these concerns in the context of China's Di Bao program, which uses means-tested ...
How have the world's poorest fared since the early 1980s? ; by Shaohua Chen and Martin Ravallion. Much ado about nothing? Do domestic firms really benefit from foreign direct investment ?; by Holger...
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...