"It has been argued that inequality should be of little concern in poor countries on the grounds that (1) absolute poverty in terms of consumption (or income) is the overriding issue in poor countries, and (2) the only thing that really matters to reducing absolute income poverty is the rate of...

"Recent literature and new data help determine plausible bounds to some key demographic differences between the poor and non-poor in the developing world. The author estimates that selective mortality-whereby poorer people tend to have higher death rates-accounts for 10-30 percent of the...

The two sources of data on aggregate economic welfare, household surveys and national accounts, can yield different results. How large is this divergence? How is it changing over time? And how does it vary by region?

The poor urbanize faster than the population as a whole. But experience across countries suggests that a majority of the poor will still live in rural areas long after most people in the developing world live in urban areas

August 1999 - To minimize the harmful impact on poor people of macroeconomic shocks, sound policies for dealing with crises - and an adequate public safety net - should be in place before a crisis starts. Many developing countries faced macroeconomic shocks in the 1980s and 1990s. The impact of...