In this report, ESCAP explores the future of urbanization in Asia and the Pacific, focusing on the dynamic shifts in the region’s urban landscape. It highlights the region’s demographic transformations, including population ageing, and the persistent challenges of urban poverty and inequality. The analysis covers urban areas of all sizes, …
It is theoretically ambiguous whether growth of cities matters more to the rural poor than growth of towns. This paper empirically examines whether growth of India's secondary towns or big cities mattered more to recent rural poverty reduction, noting that data deficiencies have made this a difficult question to answer …
It is widely acknowledged that top-down support is essential for bottom-up participatory projects to be effectively implemented at scale. However, which level of government, national or sub-national, should be given the responsibility to implement such projects is an open question, with wide variations in practice. This paper analyzes qualitative and …
While the economic growth renaissance in sub-Saharan Africa is widely recognized, much less is known about progress in living conditions. This book comprehensively evaluates trends in living conditions in 16 major sub-Saharan African countries, corresponding to nearly 75% of the total population. A striking diversity of experience emerges. While monetary …
As global extreme poverty has fallen -- by one measure, from close to 2 billion people in 1990 to about 700 million today -- the world has learned about antipoverty strategies that work. These experiences should inform the final push to end extreme poverty. In the 1960s and 1970s, when …
The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) China and Chinese Academy of Fiscal Sciences (CAFS) of the Ministry of Finance, supported by the China International Centre for Economic and Technical Exchanges (CICETE) launched the Report on Sustainable Financing for Poverty Alleviation in China. The report – as a first systematic attempt …
India’s rapid economic growth is helping drive down the number of poor people living in Asia, a new report says. The number of people living below the poverty line, on $1.90 a day or less, in South Asia decreased by 37 million in 2013 from a year earlier according to …
he number of "poor" derived by applying price adjustment to an old consumption basket, which is largely what official poverty measures have done, are very different from estimates based on actual consumption baskets that have changed over time. For instance, the share of cereals in household expenditure halved between 1993-94 …
Considerations of risk and vulnerability are key to understanding the dynamics of poverty in rural Malawi. This study measures vulnerability to consumption shortfalls and analyzes its sources using a two-period panel of 2,789 households, drawn from the 2010 Third Integrated Household Survey and the 2013 Integrated Household Panel Survey. The …
One out of every five Latin Americans—about 130 million people—have never known anything but poverty, subsisting on less than US$4 a day throughout their lives. These are the region's chronically poor, who have remained so despite unprecedented inroads against poverty in Latin America and the Caribbean since the turn of …
Chen Zeping and his wife have lived for decades in a rundown, brick-and-clay house in an impoverished village in mountainous Jinzhai county, eking out a living with odd jobs. The couple's annual net income is less than 2,800 yuan ($431) on average, and Chen, 56, must travel a long distance …
Pakistan’s first ever official report on multidimensional poverty was launched by the Ministry of Planning, Development and Reform. According to the report, nearly 39 percent of Pakistanis live in multidimensional poverty, with the highest rates of poverty in FATA and Balochistan. Pakistan’s MPI showed a strong decline, with national poverty …
Why does data about increasing rural consumption shock us? Urban imagination sees the rural as a static, timeless domain where people are bare-minimalists lacking in ambition, agency or entrepreneurship. However, even if agriculture is declining, the rural isn’t. The rural is getting reconstituted amidst this confusion with ambivalent trends.
This publication is a joint effort by the GEF partnership to showcase some of the insights gained from the now substantial portfolio of GEF-funded adaptation projects. The GEF has invested over $13 billion to help communities in the developing world adapt to climate change, notably through the Least Developed Countries …
Drawing on rich datasets from national household surveys (DHS and MICS), the 2016 global Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) covers 46 countries in Africa, which are home to just over 1 billion people. Of these, 54% of the population, 544 million people, are multidimensionally poor. Over half (54%) of people in …
This paper provides an overview of poverty and well-being trends in India since the mid-1990s. Poverty reduction since 2005 has been much faster than the earlier decade, as a result of broad-based growth across most geographic areas. Underlying this is a pattern of high mobility in economic status that has …
A taskforce set up by Niti Aayog on eliminating poverty released its report dealing in detail on how key government initiatives can contribute to uplift of poor, but stopped short of determining the poverty line as practised traditionally. Instead of the traditional practice of determining the poverty line, the report …
While the finance minister took care to express the commitment of his government to poor and vulnerable people while presenting the Union Budget for 2016–17, this stated commitment has not been backed by adequate increases in allocations to areas of critical interest to the poor. It is likely that resource …
This paper uses panel data to analyze factors that contributed to the rapid decline in poverty in India between 2005 and 2012. The analysis employs a nonparametric decomposition method that measures the relative contributions of different components of household livelihoods to observed changes in poverty. The results show that poverty …
Indian agriculture is once again in a slowdown. After the spurt of 2004–05—2011–12 when growth accelerated and the variability of production declined, in recent years growth has slowed and volatility has risen. Given weak world economic prospects and looming climate change, the main objectives of agricultural policy should now be …
A close examination of Bihar's recent growth experience reveals several paradoxes. These are paradoxes only with reference to certain orthodox positions widely held in development economics. Resolving these paradoxes helps formulate a more incisive understanding of what bottlenecks lie in the way of eliminating poverty in Bihar and opens the …
