For the past half-century, African governments and development agencies have experimented with a series of alternative approaches for addressing rural poverty, each giving way to a new paradigm as the persistence of poverty created disillusionment with prevailing approaches. These broad...

By many estimates, the world has just crossed the point where more than half the world’s population is urban, a trend driven by rapid urbanization in developing countries. Urban centers offer economies of scale in terms of productive enterprise and public investment. Cities are social melting...

This paper introduces a significant new multi-disciplinary collection of studies of poverty dynamics, presenting the reader with the latest thinking by a group of researchers who are leaders in their respective disciplines. It argues that there are three main fronts on which progress must be...

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...

China’s spectacular growth and poverty reduction has been accompanied by growing inequality which threatens the social compact and thus the political basis for economic growth and social development. The regional dimension of inequality— rural/urban, inland/coastal and provincial—dominates...

How does labor market competitiveness frame the impact of greater labor productivity and lower inequality on poverty? Specifically, does greater competitiveness increase the impact of higher labor productivity and lower inequality on poverty reduction? In a simple model, we show that there is...