Chapter 1: Origins of the Idea of a World Free of Poverty

Boxes

1. GDP
2. How is poverty measured?
3. The incentive to work
4. Income and substitution effects
5. Why might an antipoverty program result in a higher wage rate?
6. Trapped in poverty?
7. Protection and promotion
8. Concepts of “inequality”
9. When are free markets efficient?
10. Fiscal policy instruments for redistributing incomes
11. Quality and quantity of children
12. Diminishing returns in production
13. The utilitarian case against income inequality
14. Under-provision of public goods when their support is discretionary
15. Mapping cholera incidence in London
16. The income elasticity of demand and Engel’s “Law”
17. Household surveys
18. “30% of England’s population is poor”: Early lessons in poverty analysis
19. The economist’s favorite statistical tool: regression
20. Paretian welfare economics
21. Pareto’s “law”
22. Keynes’s argument as to how inequality retards economic development

Figures

1. Past poverty reduction in today’s rich world
2. References to poverty in Google Books 1700-2000

Chapter 2: New Thinking on Poverty after 1950

Boxes

1. Functionings, capabilities and utilities
2. Market failures
3. Maximin
4. Are public transfers in the U.S. creating poverty? A simple calculation
5. America’s official poverty line and comparisons with other countries

Figures

1. Global poverty rates 1820-2005
2. Official poverty rates for the US
3. Income share held by the richest one percent of American households
4. Share of agriculture in GDP across countries

Chapter 3: Measuring Welfare

Boxes

1. Consumer choice
2. The challenge of inferring utility from behavior
3. A welfarist interpretation of capabilities
4. Which distribution has more poverty?
5. Measuring INOPP when effort matters to welfare
6. Some key statistical concepts about sample surveys
7. Panel data and its applications
8. The economics of survey participation
9. The design effect on standard errors
10. Wealth as the present value of future income
11. Inter-temporal consumption choice and the Permanent Income Hypothesis
12. How well are the poor insured? Evidence from rural China
13. Regression as a tool for dealing with missing income data
14. Correcting for selective compliance in the simple 2×2 case
15. Price indices
16. More on calibrating price indices
17. The Speenhamland equivalence scale of 1795
18. A more complete treatment of equivalence scales
19. Pitfalls in testing the sensitivity of poverty measures to equivalence scales
20. Do you think you are as poor as this family?

Chapter 4: Poverty Lines

Boxes

1. Using a welfare regression to identify the poverty line
2. An economic interpretation of the poverty bundle
3. Russia’s poverty lines
4. Dissatisfaction with the official poverty line for the U.S. and a new measure
5. Setting the non-food poverty line based on the food demand function
6. Applying Samuelson’s theory of revealed preferences to poverty bundles
7. Pitfalls of the FEI method of setting poverty lines
8. The welfarist interpretation of a relative poverty line
9. Absolute, weakly relative and strongly relative poverty lines

Figures

1. Anchoring the poverty lines to food energy requirements
2. The social subjective poverty line

Chapter 5: Poverty and Inequality Measures

Boxes

1. The Lorenz curve and the Gini index
2. More on the Gini index
3. Desirable properties of an inequality measure
4. A simple and elegant but not much used measure of inequality
5. Inequality and social welfare
6. Desirable properties of a poverty measure
7. Glossary of measures of poverty
8. Different ways of defining the poverty gap index
9. An old measure nobody paid much attention to turns out to be the best!
10. Estimating the expected value of the consumption floor
11. Regression models of poverty
12. Alternative representations of a poverty profile
13. The Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition
14. Decomposing the change in poverty into growth and redistribution components
15. Sectoral decomposition of a change in poverty
16. Chronic versus transient poverty
17. An exercise in dominance testing
18. Growth incidence curves for China
19. The concentration curve and measures of targeting
20. Aggregation with and without prices
21. Two mashup indices
22. Trade-offs built into the HDI

Figures

1. Individual poverty measures for various values of the inequality-aversion parameter in the FGT index
2. The construction of the three poverty curves
3. Intersecting poverty incidence curves
4. Poverty deficit curves that intersect above the maximum poverty line
5. B and C have less poverty than A, but B has a larger “middle-income bulge”

Chapter 6: Impact evaluation

Boxes

1. Methods of impact evaluation: A summary
2. Fixed effects regressions
3. Perils in fixed-effects regressions
4. Instrumental variables
5. General equilibrium analysis
6. The bias in assessing the impact of a portfolio one component at a time
7. An example of inconsistent judgments about welfare

Chapter 7: Dimensions of Poverty and Inequality in the World

Boxes

1. Purchasing power parity exchange rates
2. Why $1.25 a day?
3. Urban bias in the ICP’s PPP for China
4. Is it true that 70% of the world’s poor are women?

Figures

1. Headcount indices for the developing world
2. Poverty gap indices for the developing world
3. Cumulative distribution functions up to U.S. poverty line
4. Mean consumption
5. Numbers and % of the population of the developing world living near the consumption floor
6. Differing fortunes for poor people in three regions
7. Distributions for the developing world as a whole in 1990 and 2005
8. Assessing the bulge relative to distribution-neutral growth
9. Elasticities of the poverty rate to distribution-neutral growth
10. Densities of middle-class population shares
11. Inequality in the developing world
12. Evolution of average inequality within countries
13. The parade of incomes across the world
14. Bourguignon-Morrisson series for global inequality
15. Average relative poverty lines
16. Global poverty rates and the differences between rich and poor countries
17. Shares of global poverty 1990 and 2008
18. Poverty rates across regions of the world
19. Counts of total poverty for 1990 and 2008
20. Declining numbers of absolutely poor along with rising numbers of relatively poor
21. Access to basic services
22. Grade 6 school completion rates for the richest and poorest quintiles across developing countries
23. Relative and absolute schooling gaps between the richest and poorest quintiles across developing countries
24. Relationship between obesity incidence and poverty across states of the US
25. Age profiles for the developing world’s poor compared to the non-poor
26. Lifetime prevalence of reported sexual violence among women

Tables

1. Poverty rates for urban and rural areas
2. Global poverty measures 1990-2008
3. Correlation matrix for the changes in poverty and inequality measures
4. Two counts of poor women

Chapter 8: Growth, Inequality and Poverty

Boxes

1. Limitations of GDP as a measure of progress
2. The production function
3. Concepts for studying economic dynamics
4. Ramsey’s model of saving
5. Ramsey’s model of poverty
6. The Harrod-Domar equation
7. The Lewis model of economic development
8. The Kuznets Inverted-U Hypothesis
9. The Harris-Todaro model
10. The Solow-Swan model
11. Growth and inequality in a credit-constrained economy
12. The coordination game
13. Threshold effects in production
14. A dynamic poverty trap
15. The predation trap
16. Just because you can’t see it does not mean it is not there
17. China’s spectacular progress against absolute poverty since 1980
18. Macroeconomic shocks and infant mortality
19. Cross-country growth regressions
20. Searching for robust predictors of the rate of growth
21. Testing whether the pattern of growth matters
22. Geographic poverty traps in rural China

Figures

1. Growth and poverty reduction in the developing world
2. The concept of inequality matters to assessing whether inequality rises in growing developing economies
3. Headcount indices across countries plotted against urban population shares
4. Global poverty rates 1820-2005
5. Poverty rates for the developing world outside China
6. Absolute poverty reduction and the distribution-corrected rate of growth

Chapter 9: Economy-Wide and Sectoral Policies

Boxes

1. Do poor people respond differently to price changes?
2. An economic interpretation of social norms against girls’ schooling
3. Using a movie to teach poor people their rights under law
4. The Stolper-Samuelson theorem
5. The welfare gain from price changes
6. Distributional impacts of China’s accession to the World Trade Organization
7. Distributional impacts of trade reform in Morocco
8. Fungibility and flypaper effects
9. Pitfalls in using eligibility to identify policy impacts
10. The “Washington Consensus”
11. Poverty and structural adjustment
12. The detective work needed to estimate capital flight

Figures

1. An example in which the leader’s social preferences entail that the poor are worse off with external aid even when it is targeted to the poor
2. GDP per capita plotted against the WGI “Rule of Law” index
3. Return to sender, address unknown
4. The PIT: a poor-institutions trap

Chapter 10: Targeted Interventions

Boxes

1. Incentive effects of a perfectly targeted cash transfer scheme
2. The equity-efficiency trade off in income redistribution
3. A basic income financed by a proportional tax on all incomes
4. Some ways of fighting corruption on antipoverty programs can backfire
5. Social insurance and social assistance
6. Incentive effects on parental choices
7. Spillover effects through local public spending choices
8. The South-West China Poverty Reduction Project

Figures

1. The share of the poorest 20% receiving help from the social safety net in developing countries