growth with equity for the development of mexico poverty inequality and economic growth 1992 2008 summary this paper constitutes an attempt to determine the relative contribution of changes in economic growth and in the distribution of income to changes in poverty in mexico our findings clearly indicate that growth with redistribution lower income inequality was the key to reducing poverty continuously and in an important manner during 2000 2006 however after 2006 decreasing per capita income coupled with the persistently high inequality gini of 52 caused the reversal of the favorable trend observed since 1996 raising poverty to pre 2002 levels consequently it is argued that for mexico a middle income country exhibiting quite low growth rates and high inequality levels the further improvement in its distribution of income and assets is essential if the economy is to succeed in making a real dent in poverty for that purpose the implementation of an active pro poor growth policy should be strongly encouraged

economic growth and poverty reduction measurement issues using income and non income indicators summary this paper first reviews the debate on the definition of pro poor growth and argues that a relative definition has merits when defining the state of pro poor growth while an absolute definition is most suitable when analyzing the rate of pro poor growth the second contribution is to extend the pro poor growth toolbox to non income indicators the analysis applied to bolivia shows that this extension greatly improves our understanding of the distribution of change in non income indicators of the linkages between progress in income and non income dimensions of poverty and on the incidence of progress in non income outcomes along the income distribution

has india s economic growth become more pro poor in the wake of economic reforms the extent to which india s poor have benefited from the country s economic growth has long been debated a new series of consumption based poverty measures spanning 50 years including a 15 year period after economic reforms began in earnest in the early 1990s is used to examine that issue growth has tended to reduce poverty including in the post reform period there is no robust evidence of more or less poverty responsiveness to growth since the reforms began although there are signs of rising inequality the impact of growth is higher when using poverty measures that reflects distribution below the poverty line and when using growth rates calculated from household surveys rather than national accounts the urban rural pattern of growth matters for the pace of poverty reduction however in marked contrast to the period before the reforms urban economic growth in the period after the reforms has brought significant gains to the rural poor as well as the urban poor

is there a future for small farms small farms are seriously challenged today in ways that make their future precarious marketing chains are changing and becoming more integrated and more demanding of quality and food safety this is creating new opportunities for farmers who can compete and link to these markets but threatens to leave many others behind in developing countries small farmers also face unfair competition from rich country farmers in many of their export and domestic markets the viability of many is further undermined by the continuing shrinkage of their average farm size and the spread of hiv aids is further eroding the number of productive farm family workers and leaving many children as orphans with limited knowledge about how to farm left to themselves these forces will curtail opportunities for small farms overly favor large farms and lead to a premature and rapid exit of many small farms adding to already serious problems of rural poverty and urban ghettos if small farmers are to have a viable future then there is a need for a concerted effort by governments ngos and the private sector to create a more enabling economic environment for their development appropriate interventions could unleash significant benefits in the form of pro poor agricultural growth in many developing countries and more than pay for themselves in terms of their economic and social return but they do not seem very likely at the moment and current trends are moving in the opposite direction

when does growth trickle down to the poor the indian case a theoretical analysis and several econometric tests have been undertaken to examine whether the trickle down effect took place in rural india over a long time period we found little evidence to suggest that the trickle down effect had occurred at all our analysis suggests that the emergence of capital labour substitution was primarily responsible for preventing growth from reducing poverty the decline in poverty and a higher growth rate that took place during the late 1970s and 1980s were largely a result of government anti poverty measures teamed with the more equitable distribution of credit and inputs to smaller and marginal farmers

a multiplier decomposition method to analyze poverty alleviation abstract the objective of this paper is to present a multiplier decomposition method focusing on poverty alleviation the decomposition captures the various mechanisms and linkages through which a production sector s output contributes to poverty alleviation within a socioeconomic system represented by a social accounting matrix sam it is shown that a multiplier can be broken down into two multiplicative effects the distributional and interdependency effects the decomposition method is applied to the case of indonesia a key policy implication is that the human capital of the poor needs to be enhanced if they are not to be sealed off from the industrialization process

household welfare effects of agricultural productivity a multidimensional perspective from ghana abstractalthough poverty reduction policies in developing countries hinge on the link between smallholder productivity and welfare micro level empirical evidence on this is limited in sub saharan africa and neglects the multidimensionality of welfare this article contributes through investigating the productivity poverty relationship using a number of welfare measures with a three period panel dataset for ghana the findings are that welfare is increasing with labour productivity irrespective of the measure used but that dramatic increases in productivity would be required to achieve meaningful poverty reduction

income dynamics in tamil nadu india from 1971 to 2003 changing roles of land and human capital this article examines the changing role of physical and human capital in income dynamics in tamil nadu india using detailed daily records of farming households from 1971 to 2003 we find that income growth until the early 1990s is attributed to the rice green revolution and the associated development of nonrice farm sector further growth after the 1990s became possible due to the rapid nonfarm sector development that has been stimulated by the liberalization of indian economy since 1991 in accordance with this change in income structure the importance of physical and human capital has changed human capital was important in the early 1970s to take advantage of the rice green revolution technology once the new technology became standard among farmers human capital became an insignificant factor the importance of human capital has revived in a different manner in recent years firstly because it has increased farmers access to nonfarm job opportunities and secondly because farm management has become more knowledge intensive in the face of increasing scarcity of labor and water the contribution of physical capital increased during the green revolution period while it started declining after that the changing mechanism is characterized as the shifting importance from physical to human capital in accordance with the changing engines of income growth from the green revolution to the development of nonfarm sector

farm productivity and rural poverty in india armed with new data we return to an old question from the pages of this journal to what extent do india s rural poor share in agricultural growth combining data from 24 household sample surveys spanning 35 years with other sources we estimate a model of the joint determination of consumption poverty measures agricultural wages and food prices we find that higher farm productivity brought both absolute and relative gains to poor rural households a large share of the gains was via wages and prices though these effects took time the benefits to the poor were not confined to those near the poverty line

poverty decline agricultural wages and non farm employment in rural india 1983 2004 the authors analyze five rounds of national sample survey data covering 1983 1987 8 1993 4 1999 0 and 2004 5 to explore the relationship between rural diversification and poverty poverty in rural india declined at a modest rate during this period the authors provide region level estimates that illustrate considerable geographic heterogeneity in this progress poverty estimates correlate well with region level data on changes in agricultural wage rates agricultural labor remains the preserve of the uneducated and also to a large extent of the scheduled castes and scheduled tribes although agricultural labor grew as a share of total economic activity over the first four rounds it had fallen back to the levels observed at the beginning of the survey period by 2004 this all india trajectory masks widely varying trends across states during this period the rural non farm sector grew modestly mainly between the last two survey rounds regular non farm employment remains largely associated with education levels and social status that are rare among the poor however casual labor and self employment in the non farm sector reveal greater involvement by disadvantaged groups in 2004 than in the preceding rounds the implication for poverty is not immediately clear the poor may be pushed into low return casual non farm activities due to lack of opportunities in the agricultural sector rather than being pulled by high returns offered by the non farm sector econometric estimates reveal that expansion of the non farm sector is associated with falling poverty via two routes a direct impact on poverty that is likely due to a pro poor marginal incidence of non farm employment expansion and an indirect impact attributable to the positive effect of non farm employment growth on agricultural wages the analysis also confirms the important contribution to rural poverty reduction from agricultural productivity availability of land and consumption levels in proximate urban areas

globalization and rural poverty as is common in most contentious public debates different people mean different things by globalization some interpret it to mean the global reach of new technology and capital movements some refer to outsourcing by domestic companies in rich countries others protest against the tentacles of corporate capitalism or us hegemony economic military or cultural in this chapter i shall limit myself to interpreting globalization simply as openness to foreign trade and long term capital flows i shall ignore here the important issues arising from the devastation caused to fragile economies by billions of dollars of volatile short term capital stampeding around the globe in herd like movements or the substantial poverty reducing potential of international unskilled labour flows from poor to rich countries even if allowed in temporary and regulated doses

money and liquidity effects separating demand from supply in the canonical monetary policy model money is endogenous to the optimal path for interest rates and output but when liquidity provision by banks dominates the demand for transactions money from the real economy money is likely to contain information for future output because of its impact on financial spreads and so we decompose broad money into primitive demand and supply shocks we find that supply shocks have played a significant role in the time series in each of the usa uk and eurozone in the short to medium term we further consider to what extent the supply of broad money is related to policy or to liquidity effects from financial intermediation

looking at pro poor growth from an agricultural perspective summary pro poor growth has been identified as one of the most promising pathways to accelerate poverty reduction in developing countries the diagnostic pro poor growth toolbox has so far focused on the income dimension as well as key non income achievements in education and health this article contributes to the literature by expanding the toolbox with several new measures that take into account the extraordinary importance of agricultural productivity for poverty reduction in developing countries we distinguish between land productivity and labor productivity and find that the poor identified by low incomes poor education outcomes low land productivity and low labor productivity overlap only to a small degree suggesting that analyses of pro poor growth from these different perspectives are complementary the toolbox is then applied to three comparable household surveys from rwanda eicv data for the years 1999 2001 2005 06 and 2010 11 a country that has experienced impressive economic growth since the genocide in the mid 1990s and that has undertaken considerable efforts to increase agricultural productivity and improve the population s access to social services over the first decade of the 2000s our application shows that the enormous progress made in the income education and health dimension of well being has been pro poor according to most definitions of the concept the new tools reveal that the land productivity poor experienced pro poor growth in the relative and absolute sense while the labor productivity poor increased their labor productivity relatively but not absolutely faster than the labor productivity rich even though the former dispose of considerably lower education levels

growth and poverty revisited from a multidimensional perspective the actual impact of economic growth on poverty reduction is of fundamental importance to the development agenda this paper offers new empirical evidence on growth and poverty measured from a mult

rural nonfarm employment and incomes in the himalayas abstract nonfarm activities generate on average about 60 of rural households incomes in the himalayas this article analyzes the determinants of participation in nonfarm activities and of nonfarm incomes across rural households a unique data set collected in the himalayan region of india allows us to deal with the heterogeneity of rural nonfarm activities by using aggregations into categories that are useful both analytically and for policy purposes we conduct an empirical inquiry that reveals that education plays a major role in accessing more remunerative nonfarm employment other household assets and characteristics such as land social status and geographical location also play a role

growth still is good for the poor incomes in the poorest two quintiles on average increase at the same rate as overall average incomes this is because in a global dataset spanning 118 countries over the past four decades changes in the share of income of the poorest quintiles are generally small and uncorrelated with changes in average income the variation in changes in quintile shares is also small relative to the variation in growth in average incomes implying that the latter accounts for most of the variation in income growth in the poorest quintiles these findings hold across most regions and time periods and when conditioning on a variety of country level factors that may matter for growth and inequality changes this evidence confirms the central importance of economic growth for poverty reduction and illustrates the difficulty of identifying specific macroeconomic policies that are significantly associated with the relative growth rates of those in the poorest quintiles

four scenarios of development and the role of economic policy we ask which economic policies can help a country create the most favourable conditions for development we observe that the dynamics of several development indicators can be grouped into four clusters each cluster corresponding to a different combination of growth and changes in inequality based on this observation we define four different development scenarios and use limited dependent variable regressions to study how structural and policy factors affect a country s probability to achieve the most or the least favourable of these scenarios our results point to a comforting picture through the choice of appropriate policies countries can effectively increase their chances to achieve the most favourable development scenario

explaining international and intertemporal variations in income inequality this paper explores the propositions that income inequality is relatively stable within countries and that it varies significantly among countries a new and expanded data set provides broad support for both propositions drawing on a political economy and capital market imperfection arguments to explain the intertemporal and international variation in inequality the empirical analysis shows that the predicted variables associated with the first argument a measure of civil liberties and the initial level of secondary schooling and the second argument a measure of financial depth and the initial distribution of land are indeed important determinants of inequality this paper explores two propositions regarding income inequality they are first income inequality is relatively stable within countries and second it varies significantly across countries to illustrate note that the gini coefficient in india remained almost constant for forty years 1951 92 with mean 32 6 and standard deviation 2 0 2 in contrast the variation in gini coefficients across countries is large 61 9 in honduras in 1968 compared with 17 8 in bulgaria in 1976 if substantiated these propositions have potentially significant implications for poverty the significance of the first is obvious barring any fundamental socio political change poverty reduction will depend crucially on the rate of economic growth given this the significance of the second is that in inegalitarian economies the poor will enjoy a smaller share of any national increment in income than in more egalitarian ones drawing on a new and expanded data set on inequality deininger and squire 1996a the first of the paper s three sections conducts standard statistical tests of the two propositions the sample comprises 573 observations on the most common measure of inequality the gini coefficient for 49 developed and developing countries covering the period 1947 94 the results broadly confirm our two propositions specifically analysis of variance anova shows that about 90 of the total variance in the gini coefficients

does legislative turnover adversely affect state expenditure policy evidence from indian state elections the effect of legislative turnover on the size and composition of government expenditures in indian states over the 1980 2000 period is examined the paper finds that excessive turnover in indian state elections results in inefficient government expenditure policy first the higher the turnover the larger the government size second excessive turnover affects the allocative efficiency of government expenditures by skewing the composition of government spending toward pure consumption and away from more productive investment expenditures third the effect of turnover on fiscal policy is not linear public consumption expenditure is convex in turnover while public investment expenditure is concave in turnover

development and income distribution the case of puerto rico abstract using data spanning half a century the study addresses the trends and factors behind changes in income distribution in one of the earliest examples of development through integration to the world economy results show remarkable income growth that generated an ambiguous long term change in inequality but a drastic reduction in poverty public transfers played a decisive role in restraining growth in inequality and in reducing poverty levels that were also affected favorably by changes in the distribution of female earned income finally although rising schooling levels and their absolute returns increased households income generating capacities the realization of the potential was hindered by increasing levels of unemployment and economic inactivity

charitable donations by uk households evidence from the family expenditure survey this paper reports estimates based on both standard tobit and generalized tobit techniques of the determinants of charitable giving in the uk using 1984 family expenditure survey data this is the first such study using uk data separate estimates are presented of the determinants of participation and of the level of donations by giving households participation is seen to be sensitive to income the tax price of giving and a range of demographic variables while the level of donations varies primarily with income donations are found to be inelastic with respect to changes in disposable income

is india s economic growth leaving the poor behind there has been much debate about how much india s poor have shared in the economic growth unleashed by economic reforms in the 1990s the authors argue that india has probably maintained its 1980s rate of poverty reduction in the 1990s however there is considerable diversity in performance across states this holds some important clues for understanding why economic growth has not done more for india s poor india s economic growth in the 1990s has not been occurring in the states where it would have the most impact on poverty nationally if not for the sectoral and geographic imbalance of growth the national rate of growth would have generated a rate of poverty reduction that was double india s historical trend rate states with relatively low levels of initial rural development and human capital development were not well suited to reduce poverty in response to economic growth the study s results are consistent with the view that achieving higher aggregate economic growth is only one element of an effective strategy for poverty reduction in india the sectoral and geographic composition of growth is also important as is the need to redress existing inequalities in human resource development and between rural and urban areas

food prices and poverty do higher food prices help or hinder poverty reduction despite much debate existing research has almost solely relied on simulation models to address this question in this paper world bank poverty estimates are used to systematically test the relationship between changes in poverty and exogenous changes in real domestic food prices the paper uncovers indicative evidence that increases in food prices are associated with reductions in poverty not increases a likely empirical explanation is the relatively strong agricultural supply and wage responses to food price increases and the fact that the majority of the world s poor still heavily rely on agriculture or agriculture related activities to earn a living

growth inequality and poverty looking beyond averages the evidence is compelling that the poor in developing countries do typically share in the gains from rising aggregate affluence and in the losses from aggregate contraction but how much do poor people share in growth do they gain more in some settings than others do some gain while others lose does pro poor growth mean more or less aggregate growth recent theories and evidence suggest some answers but deeper microeconomic empirical work is needed on growth and distributed change only then will we have a firm basis for identifying the specific policies and programs needed to complement and possibly modify growth oriented policies

micro level welfare impacts of agricultural productivity evidence from rural malawi this article analyses the micro level welfare impacts of agricultural productivity using a two wave nationally representative panel data from rural malawi welfare is measured by various dimension

poverty reduction without economic growth explaining brazil s poverty dynamics 1985 2004 brazil s slow pace of poverty reduction over the last two decades reflects both low growth and a low growth elasticity of poverty reduction using gdp data disaggregated by state and sector for a twenty year period this paper finds considerable variation in the poverty reducing effectiveness of growth across sectors across space and over time growth in the services sector was substantially more poverty reducing than was growth in either agriculture or industry growth in industry had very different effects on poverty across different states and its impact varied with initial conditions related to human development and worker empowerment the determinants of poverty reduction changed around 1994 positive growth rates and a greater absolute elasticity with respect to agricultural growth contributed to faster poverty reduction but because there was so little of it economic growth played a relatively small role in accounting for brazil s poverty reduction between 1985 and 2004 the taming of hyperinflation in 1994 and substantial expansions in social security and social assistance transfers beginning in 1988 accounted for a larger share of the overall reduction in poverty

principal challenges confronting smallholder agriculture in sub saharan africa summary this paper uses small scale farm survey data from five countries of eastern and southern africa to highlight four under appreciated issues i how land distribution patterns constrain the potential of crop technology and input intensification to enable many small farms to escape from poverty ii why most smallholders are unable to produce more than a marginal surplus or participate meaningfully in commodity markets iii why most farmers are directly hurt by higher grain prices and iv why the marketed agricultural surplus is exceedingly concentrated among a small group of relatively large smallholders policy and public investment options are reviewed in the light of these findings there is no one future for small farms in africa much depends on government policy and investment decisions

the future of small farms trajectories and policy priorities summary while smallholder development has in the past led to reductions in poverty and hunger does this still apply in today s more globalized world this paper reviews the debates on the contemporary role of agriculture in development and the case for small farms in light of the rise of supermarkets lower commodity prices and liberalized trade agricultural research funding environmental change hiv aids and changing policy ideas although the answers vary greatly by context for many low income countries smallholder development remains a key option the policy agenda however has changed in addition to providing public goods the growing challenge is to overcome market failures which is largely a matter of institutional innovation

poverty dynamics in rural orissa transitions in assets and occupations over generations abstractwe investigate whether historic land distribution determines stagnation or development of indian villages the empirical analysis is motivated by the banerjee and newman 1993 model of occupational choice and economic development family histories are collected for a random sample of 800 households households are classified into economic categories according to the assets occupations mix at present and at grandfather s time transitions are described and for a remote district explained by the historic village land distribution we also investigate the role of social identity and find that scheduled tribes are more likely trapped in poverty than scheduled castes

isolation and agricultural productivity this article examines the mechanisms that transmit isolation into productivity in particular we study the effect of isolation and transport infrastructure on welfare and agricultural productivity in the case of madagascar madagascar is a good case study given the bad shape of its infrastructure and therefore the significant variation in isolation based on comprehensive household survey data combined with a census of communes we discover a strong poverty isolation relationship further we find the inverse relationship between agricultural productivity and isolation to be surprisingly strong we isolate the following reasons why productivity might decline with isolation i transportation induced transaction costs ii the inverse relationship between plot size and productivity iii increasing price variability and extensification onto less fertile land and iv insecurity

macroeconomic performance and poverty in brazil abstract drawing on brazilian time series data this study finds an inelastic link between poverty and wages over the macroeconomic cycle that is devoid of the asymmetric effects that characterise the phenomenon s response to changes in the rate of unemployment deepening of structural reforms in the second half of the 1990s had no effect on the aforementioned relationships which also varied little by regional level of development finally the connection between poverty and long term income changes was more elastic suggesting an association between the economy s recent disappointing performance in alleviating poverty and its lacklustre growth record over the past two decades

population economy and society in west bengal since the 1970s abstract west bengal a major state of eastern india is conspicuous not only for being ruled by an elected leftist coalition since 1977 often described as sound political stability but also for its widely acknowledged successes in fertility transition execution of redistributive land reform and political decentralisation programmes ironically however the state in almost all comparative assessments of social human and infrastructural developments occupies a lagged position vis a vis many other states especially in the south and even against all india records this paper seeks to examine this paradox by comprehensively evaluating west bengal s relative performance in demographic and socio economic transformations a well disciplined grassroots political mobilisation network and the machinery of the left front parties have been highly instrumental for comparatively fast declines of fertility and population growth and for lasting political stability in an otherwise laggard development regime

why has economic growth been more pro poor in some states of india than others abstract we use 20 household surveys for india s 15 major states spanning 1960 1994 to study how the sectoral composition of economic growth and initial conditions interact to influence how much growth reduced consumption 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 non farm output varied appreciably and the differences were quantitatively important to the overall rate of poverty reduction states with higher elasticities did not experience higher rates of non farm growth the non farm growth process was more pro poor in states with initially higher literacy higher farm productivity higher rural living standards relative to urban areas lower landlessness and lower infant mortality

economic liberalization and indian economic growth what s the evidence india s growth and poverty performance over the last three decades has been a subject of great curiosity unlike the east asian countries india s growth spurt is not associated with exceptionally high domestic savings or foreign capital inflows or manufacturing exports so what triggered the change in the growth trajectory did the market liberalization policies of the 1990s help how have the initial conditions shaped the process and how has the indian model impinged on india s central problem of mass poverty this paper surveys the literature and offers its own assessment of the drivers of change jel i32 o13 o14 o15 o21 o47

high rural population density africa what are the growth requirements and who participates abstract a large and increasing proportion of agricultural growth in africa must come from continuous gains in land productivity in areas of high population density and hence with already relatively high yields what that requires is analogous to the green revolution in asia several features differentiate the african situation those include greater diversity in cropping pattern including a historically larger and more widespread tropical commodity export sector the physical infrastructure in rural africa is far inferior to that of most asian countries while the greater diversity of agriculture calls for a larger and more diverse institutional structure the reality is that the research systems the ancillary education systems to spread innovation and the rural financial systems are generally greatly inferior to those of asia at the beginning of the green revolution ethiopia s record of a steady six to seven percent growth for agriculture and nearly halving of rural poverty demonstrates that with the right policies and investments a very poor country starting with poor physical and institutional infrastructure can bring a major contribution from agriculture growth to increased gdp and reduced poverty as in asia the bulk of accelerated agricultural growth will come from small commercial farmers they have sufficient farm income to reach or exceed the poverty level those are farms with depending on the country as little as 0 75 hectares to a few tens of hectares of land they comprise up to half the rural population and produce on the order of 70 80 percent of agricultural output they are in general not poor the poor have inadequate land to reach the poverty level initially with much underemployment and with substantial non farm employment the primary driver of poverty reduction is the small commercial farmer spending on the order of half of increased income on nontradable employment intensive goods and services from the rural non farm sector

estimating the relative benefits of agricultural growth on the distribution of expenditures does the sectoral composition of aggregate economic growth affect poverty we ask whether agricultural growth in developing countries increases the expenditures of poorer households more than growth in other sectors while some reduced form analyses have tackled this question using either country level time series data regional panel data for one country or cross sectional country data this paper is unusual in using panel data for many countries we improve on much of the existing literature by devising an instrumental variables strategy to correct for the endogeneity of sectoral gdp growth involving averaging over sectoral income growth rates for neighboring countries our principal finding from our instrumental variable estimator is that the estimated elasticities associated with growth in agricultural income are significantly greater than for non agricultural income for all but the extreme top and bottom deciles in the middle range of the income distribution the effect of a given gdp growth due to agriculture is 3 4 times larger than if it was due to non agricultural activities having established that on average growth in gdp originating in agriculture is more beneficial for poorer deciles we finally explore whether this is a pattern which holds across different groupings of countries a second important finding is that there is heterogeneity across some groupings most particularly we find that it is the poorest people in the poorest countries for whom agricultural income growth is the most beneficial

how infrastructure and financial institutions affect rural income and poverty evidence from bangladesh the mechanisms by which the poor benefit from economic growth remain a topic of debate in development literature we address this issue in the context of rural bangladesh using a pooled dataset of three household panels between 1991 2001 expansion of irrigation paved roads electricity and access to formal and informal credit have through different veins led to higher rural farm and non farm incomes accounting for exogenous local agroclimatic endowments that explain a large part of the variation in the growth of infrastructure and credit programmes however this has not translated into substantial reductions in poverty for the poorest households

nonfarm employment and rural welfare evidence from the himalayas the potential importance of nonfarm employment for the welfare of rural households has long been recognized but whether the nonfarm sector offers prospects for improving the welfare of the rural poor remains a contentious issue we examine distributional and well being effects of nonfarm employment of rural households in the himalayas we account for heterogeneity of nonfarm employment and estimate a system of structural equations to better understand the causal linkages between nonfarm employment and household well being the results confirm that disaggregating nonfarm employment activities matters for understanding the relationship between nonfarm employment and rural welfare while low return nonfarm employment is associated with lower income inequality high return nonfarm activities have a disequalizing effect on the distribution of household incomes we also find that the ability to engage in high return nonfarm activities is associated with higher economic well being poor households on the other hand tend to rely on low return activities that do not contribute to improved well being

why have some indian states done better than others at reducing rural poverty the unevenness of the rise in rural living standards in the various states of india since the 1950s allowed the authors to study the causes of poverty they modeled the evolution of average consumption and various poverty measures using pooled state level data for 1957 91 they found that poverty was reduced by higher agricultural yields above trend growth in nonfarm output and lower inflation rates but these factors only partly explain relative success and failure in reducing poverty initial conditions also mattered states that started the period with better infrastructure and human resources with more intense irrigation greater literacy and lower infant mortality rates had significantly greater long term rates of consumption growth and poverty reduction by and large the same variables that promoted growth in average consumption also helped reduce poverty the effects on poverty measures were partly redistributive in nature after controlling for inflation the authors found that some of the factors that helped reduce absolute poverty also improved distribution and none of the factors that reduced absolute poverty had adverse impacts on distribution in other words there was no sign of tradeoffs between growth and pro poor distribution

what has luck got to do with it a regional analysis of poverty and agricultural growth in rural india this article explores the role of agro ecological factors associated with agricultural growth and poverty outcomes in india using a new operationalisation of agro ecological factors and incorporating within state variations in poverty and other variables we show that agricultural growth and poverty reduction appear to depend on underlying agro ecological conditions which are favourable to the spread of irrigation and hence agricultural development which in turn in associated with poverty reduction promotion of agriculture in less favoured areas in unlikely to have similar effects on agriculture in less favoured areas is unlikely to have similar effects on agricultural growth even if the effects of agricultural growth on poverty remain similar unless conditions for irrigation are favourable or rainfall is sufficiently abundant and reliable this suggests that considerable caution may be needed in drawing policy conclusions from empirical analysis by state alone and without regard to their underlying f

the composition of growth matters for poverty alleviation this paper contributes to explain the cross country heterogeneity of the poverty response to changes in economic growth it does so by focusing on the structure of output growth the paper presents a two sector theoretical model that clarifies the mechanism through which the sectoral composition of growth and associated labor intensity can affect workers wages and thus poverty alleviation then it presents cross country empirical evidence that analyzes first the differential poverty reducing impact of sectoral growth at various levels of disaggregation and the role of unskilled labor intensity in such differential impact the paper finds evidence that not only the size of economic growth but also its composition matters for poverty alleviation with the largest contributions from labor intensive sectors such as agriculture construction and manufacturing the results are robust to the influence of outliers alternative explanations and various poverty measures

what can new survey data tell us about recent changes in distribution and poverty it has been claimed that in recent times the poor have lost ground both relatively and absolutely even when average levels of living have risen this article tests that claim using household surveys for 67 developing and transitional economies over 1981 94 it finds that changes in inequality and polarization were uncorrelated with changes in average living standards distribution improved as often as it worsened in growing economies and negative growth was often more detrimental to distribution than positive growth overall there was a small decrease in absolute poverty although with diverse experiences across regions and countries almost always poverty fell with growth in average living standards and rose with contraction

the kuznets process and the inequality development relationship abstract in his classic paper on economic growth and income inequality kuznets discussed the process of population shift from traditional to modern activities as the basis for a theory of distributional change during the course of development in this paper we present a formalization of the kuznets process conduct a general analysis of distributional change under this process and derive the functional forms of and conditions for a turning point in the inequality development relationship for six commonly used indices of inequality the functional form appropriate to each index is then estimated using cross section data on 60 developing and developed countries finally some extensions to the initial formalization of the kuznets process are considered

pro poor growth and sustainable development framework evidence from two step gmm estimator abstract the environmental sustainability agenda is not easy to be achieved without implementing pro growth and pro poor growth policies across the globe pakistan s economy is no exception that strive hard to managed environmental resource capital and pro poor growth expenditures in order to reduce poverty incidence and carbon mitigation policies while many efforts need more sustainable instruments to be achieved united nation s assigned sustainable development target till 2030 the study selected an annual time series data from 1975 to 2016 and employed two step generalized method of moments gmm estimator for robust inferences the results show that higher economic growth decreases poverty incidence through social reforms while deforestation under 5 mortality rate trade openness carbon emissions and fdi inflows largely increases poverty incidence in a country the study confirmed environmental kuznets curve ekc hypothesis of carbon emissions in relation of per capita income and public spending on education while pollution haven hypothesis is confirmed due to high involvement of dirty polluting industries in country s economic transformation process the fossil fuel combustion and high population density increases carbon emissions that sabotage the process of sustainable development in a country thus it is imperative to device sustainable policies for mitigating carbon fossil emissions with cleaner production techniques and improves the quality of life of poor people through increase social expenditures that trickle down to the poor as compared to the non poor

african re agrarianization accumulation or pro poor agricultural growth recent signs of increasing agricultural production in a number of countries in sub saharan africa are by some commentators connected to local level differentiation this paper discusses such interpretations using household level longitudinal data from smallholder households in eight african countries for the period between 2002 and 2008 the use of a mixed methods social science approach complements traditional economic approaches through adding a spatial perspective pro poor agricultural growth so far is concentrated to particular villages where it is highly inclusive the policy challenge remains to devise strategies that can enhance growth also in marginal areas

are there lessons for africa from china s success against poverty at the outset of china s reform period the country had a far higher poverty rate than for africa as a whole within five years that was no longer true this paper tries to explain how china escaped from a situation in which extreme poverty persisted due to failed and unpopular policies while acknowledging that africa faces constraints that china did not and that context matters two lessons stand out the first is the importance of productivity growth in smallholder agriculture which will require both market based incentives and public support the second is the role played by strong leadership and a capable public administration at all levels of government

the evolving role of agriculture in poverty reduction an empirical perspective abstract the role of agriculture in development remains much debated this paper takes an empirical perspective and focuses on poverty as opposed to growth alone the contribution of a sector to poverty reduction is shown to depend on its own growth performance its indirect impact on growth in other sectors the extent to which poor people participate in the sector and the size of the sector in the overall economy bringing together these different effects using cross country econometric evidence indicates that agriculture is significantly more effective in reducing poverty among the poorest of the poor as reflected in the 1 day squared poverty gap it is also up to 3 2 times better at reducing 1 day headcount poverty in low income and resource rich countries including those in sub saharan africa at least when societies are not fundamentally unequal however when it comes to the better off poor reflected in the 2 day measure non agriculture has the edge these results are driven by the much larger participation of poorer households in growth from agriculture and the lower poverty reducing effect of non agriculture in the presence of extractive industries

biofuel production and its impact on food security in low and middle income countries implications for the post 2015 sustainable development goals abstract the post 2015 sustainable development goals sdgs aim to strengthen the achievements of the millennium development goals mdgs there are 17 sdgs the first two tackle ending poverty and hunger as well as food insecurity under nutrition and sustainable agriculture to address these goals requires eradicating chronic hunger this paper examines challenges associated with biofuel production and how they relate to sdgs and their targets we mainly focus on challenges associated with biofuel production not adequately addressed in the sdgs it draws from a range of peer reviewed and grey literature to advance the understanding of how biofuel production will impact the post 2015 development agenda the findings suggest that increasing use of food crops to produce biofuels in the united states european union japan and brazil has been one important element in explaining the steady rise in staple food prices since 2000 while this is a potential threat to food and nutrition security in low and middle income countries biofuel production also offers significant opportunities in low income countries there are several challenges to the development and harnessing of biofuels these include 1 the interaction between biofuel production and climate change 2 biofuel production and foreignisation of land 3 food wastage 4 poor governance and limited production capacity 5 biofuel production within a weak and fragmented policy framework 6 biofuel production land tenure and socio economic impacts 7 biofuel production and conflicts and 8 biofuel production and deforestation for the post 2015 sustainable development agenda to have an impact strong actions are required to protect rural communities as well as nurture the biofuels industry this should be matched by commensurate investments in food and nutrition security and transparent public private partnerships this calls for strong and pro poor policies on feedstock farming processing and trading such policies must address the rhetoric of stakeholder participation in land use management

non farm activity household expenditure and poverty reduction in rural vietnam 2002 2008 summary diversifying into non farm activities has been suggested as an effective way out of poverty for rural households in developing countries using the vietnamese household living standards surveys of 2002 2004 2006 and 2008 we test this claim and investigate the effect of non farm sector involvement on poverty and expenditure growth our endogeneity corrected estimates show that an additional household member involved with non farm activity reduces the probability of poverty by 7 12 and increases the household expenditure by 14 over a two year period our findings also indicate that non farm involvement reduces the hours worked on farm but not the household agricultural income

bringing income distribution in from the cold the title of this presidential address is chosen to highlight the way in which the subject of income distribution has in the past been marginalised for much of this century it has been very much out in the cold there are signs that in the 1990s it is being welcomed back and i shall be referring to recent research but i would like to use this occasion to give further impetus to the re incorporation of income distribution into the main body of economic analysis this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

food insecurity income inequality and the changing comparative advantage in world agriculture i would like to argue in this article that in the process of economic development in land poor countries in asia agriculture faces three distinctly different problems food insecurity sectoral income inequality and the declining food self sufficiency associated with the declining comparative advantage in agriculture at the high income stage massive imports of food grains to asia if they occur will aggravate the world food shortage which will have significant implications for the poverty incidence in the world i argue that in order to avoid such a tragedy asia should expand farm size to reduce labor cost by adopting large scale mechanization sub saharan africa should realize a green revolution in grain production and latin america should further expand its grain production capacity

implications of higher global food prices for poverty in low income countries in many poor countries the recent increases in prices of staple foods raise the real incomes of those selling food many of whom are relatively poor while hurting net food consumers many of whom are also relatively poor the impacts on poverty will certainly be very diverse but the average impact on poverty depends upon the balance between these two effects and can only be determined by looking at real world data results using household data for ten observations on nine low income countries show that the short run impacts of higher staple food prices on poverty differ considerably by commodity and by country but that poverty increases are much more frequent and larger than poverty reductions the recent large increases in food prices appear likely to raise overall poverty in low income countries substantially

preferences spatial prices and inequality abstractthis study examines the effect of prices on inequality in rural india during the period of economic reforms and beyond 1999 2000 2009 2010 it proposes a framework for calculating exact price indices based on the exact affine stone index easi demand system and shows its usefulness by calculating spatial prices and regionally varying temporal prices that allow for both differences in preferences between states and over time the study finds that the nature of inflation has been regressive during 1999 2000 2004 2005 and progressive during 2004 2005 2009 2010 and that the effects of temporal price inflation and spatial prices on inequality are qualitatively different

measuring pro poor growth in non income dimensions current concepts and measurement of pro poor growth is entirely focused on the income dimension of well being this neglects non income dimensions of poverty and the multidimensionality of poverty and wellbeing in this paper we introduce the multidimensionality of poverty into the measurement of pro poor growth measurement by applying the growth incidence curve to non income indicators we develop growth incidence curves and calculate the associated ravallion chen pro poor growth measures for a range of non income indicators such as education mortality vaccinations stunting and a multidimensional wellbeing measure and are thereby able to study improvements in these dimensions of well being at various points of the distribution of those indicators as well as at various points of the income distribution this way we can determine whether improvements in non income indicators were pro poor in an absolute or relative sense we illustrate this empirically for bolivia between 1989 and 1998 and find that growth was relatively pro poor in the non income dimension results for absolute improvements are less clear

land accumulation dynamics in developing country agriculture abstractunderstanding land accumulation dynamics is relevant for policy makers interested in the economic effects of land inequality in developing country agriculture we thus explore and simultaneously test the leading theories of micro level land accumulation dynamics using unique panel data from paraguay the results suggest that farm growth varies systematically with farm size a formal rejection of stochastic growth theories that is gibrat s law and that titled land area may have considerable influence on land accumulation furthermore our estimates indicate that a dualistic agrarian structure is the likely product of the unfettered operation of land markets

can high inequality developing countries escape absolute poverty do the poor face the same prospects for escaping poverty in high inequality developing countries as in low inequality countries is it possible for inequality to be so great as to stifle prospects of reducing absolute poverty even when other initial conditions and policies are favorable to growth household survey data for developing countries suggest that initial distribution does affect how much the poor share in rising average incomes higher initial inequality tends to reduce growth s impact on absolute poverty by the same token higher inequality diminishes the adverse impact on the poor of general economic contraction combining this evidence with that from recent investigations of inequality s effect on growth the author finds that if inequality is high enough countries that would have very good growth prospects at low levels of inequality may see little or no overall growth and little progress in reducing poverty or even a worsening on both counts the data the author uses suggest that such cases do occur the precision with which key parameters have been estimated makes it difficult to say with confidence how common such cases are but they appear to be in the minority what appear to be the best available estimates suggest that about one fifth of the spells between surveys he analyzed were cases in which poverty was rising yet positive growth in the mean and hence falling poverty is predicted at zero inequality inequality can be high enough to result in rising poverty despite good underlying growth prospects