Even primary education, surprisingly, has no perceptible pro-poor bias, although it does, as expected, promote growth, and therefore helps the poor to that extent. Only two policies appear to have a systematically biased effect that is, they affect the distribution of income as well as growth in incomes overall. One is cutting inflation, and the other is cutting public spending. Both of these raise growth, as you might expect. What you might not expect is that they also improve the distribution of income, benefiting the poor twice over.
Surveys often show that the poor hate inflation more than the rich.
The public-spending result seems more surprising. High public spending is often justified as a way to help the poor. Social spending , the category of public expenditure most explicitly targeted on the poor, is merely neutral, having almost no effect one way or the other on either growth or distribution. It is hard to believe that this study is going to change many backlashers minds. After all, the authors are from the World Bank, so their work can be put in the bin unread.