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Bailing Out The World's Poorest, Martin Ravallion
Bailing Out The World's Poorest, Martin Ravallion
Martin Ravallion
While the 2008 financial crisis is global in nature, it is likely to have heterogeneous welfare impacts within the developing world, with some countries, and some people, more vulnerable than others. It also threatens to have lasting impacts for some of those affected, notably through the nutrition and schooling of children in poor families. These features point to the need for a differentiated social policy response, aiming to provide rapid income support to those in most need, while preserving the key physical and human assets of poor people and their communities. The paper points out some mistakes in past crisis …
Are There Lessons For Africa From China’S Success Against Poverty?, Martin Ravallion
Are There Lessons For Africa From China’S Success Against Poverty?, Martin Ravallion
Martin Ravallion
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 for Africa stand out. The first is the initial 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 …
Decentralizing Eligibility For A Federal Antipoverty Program, Martin Ravallion
Decentralizing Eligibility For A Federal Antipoverty Program, Martin Ravallion
Martin Ravallion
In theory, the informational advantage of decentralizing the eligibility criteria for a federal antipoverty program could come at a large cost to the program’s performance in reaching the poor nationally. Whether this happens in practice depends on the size of the local income effect on the eligibility cut-offs. China’s Di Bao program provides a case study. Poorer municipalities are found to adopt systematically lower thresholds—roughly negating inter-city differences in need for the program and generating considerable horizontal inequity, whereby poor families in rich cities fare better. The income effect is not strong enough to undermine the program’s overall poverty impact; …
Dollar A Day Revisited, Martin Ravallion
Dollar A Day Revisited, Martin Ravallion
Martin Ravallion
The paper presents the first major update of the international “$1 a day” poverty line, first proposed in 1990 for measuring absolute poverty by the standards of the world’s poorest countries. In a new data set of national poverty lines we find that a marked economic gradient only emerges when consumption per person is above about $2.00 a day at 2005 purchasing power parity. Below this, the average poverty line is $1.25, which we propose as the new international poverty line. Relative poverty appears to matter more to developing countries than has been thought. Our proposed schedule of relative poverty …
How Relevant Is Targeting To The Success Of An Antipoverty Program?, Martin Ravallion
How Relevant Is Targeting To The Success Of An Antipoverty Program?, Martin Ravallion
Martin Ravallion
Policy-oriented discussions often assume that “better targeting” implies larger impacts on poverty or more cost-effective interventions for fighting poverty. The literature on the economics of targeting warns against that assumption, but evidence has been scarce, and the lessons from the literature have often been ignored by practitioners. The paper shows that standard measures of targeting performance are uninformative, or even deceptive, about the impacts on poverty, and cost-effectiveness in reducing poverty, of a large cash transfer program in China. The results suggest that in program design and evaluation, it would be better to focus directly on the program’s outcomes for …
Land In Transition: Reform And Poverty In Rural Vietnam, Martin Ravallion, Dominique Van De Walle
Land In Transition: Reform And Poverty In Rural Vietnam, Martin Ravallion, Dominique Van De Walle
Martin Ravallion
No abstract provided.