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Andy Sumner and I recently wrote about the fact that the number of low income countries in the world is rapidly shrinking –which is great news because it suggests poor countries are getting richer. But how much does graduating to ‘middle income’ mean? Here’s how the original income classification came about, according to the World Bank’s website:
This is a joint post with Charles Kenny
Zambia and Ghana are the 27th and 28th countries the World Bank has reclassified as middle-income since the year 2000
Doctors perform cataract surgery at the Lusaka Eye Hospital in Zambia. It's inexpensive and it changes people's lives instantly, so it's a good example of how just a little bit more money can make a huge difference to the world's poorest people. Photograph: Per-Anders Pettersson/Getty Images
Remember the poverty trap? Countries stuck in destitution because of weak institutions put in place by colonial overlords, or because of climates that foster disease, or geographies that limit access to global markets, or simply by the fact that poverty is overwhelmingly self-perpetuating. Apparently the trap can be escaped.
Living in Ethiopia for the last three years, I saw aid working every day. I saw children going to school, health workers in rural villages, and food or cash preventing hunger for the poorest people. The academic debates about aid effectiveness seem surreal when you are surrounded by tangible, visible evidence of the huge difference aid makes to people’s lives.
Central America experienced almost a decade of economic progress between 2003 and 2008, when GDP per capita growth averaged 3 percent per year. Yet the region’s five countries–Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua–still lag other middle income economies. Their high dependence on their primary commodities and the U.S. economy makes the growth slow and volatile. Even more worrying are high levels of poverty and inequality. Significant structural changes are urgently needed to secure sustained and inclusive growth.
Five years ago, probably the most positive you could be about global development was to argue that, despite a sluggish performance in reducing global income poverty connected to slow-changing institutions, broader quality of life in areas like education and health had improved everywhere. That’s pretty much the story I told in Getting Better. But since then, what we have learned about development progress suggests su
Recently, I was called for advice by someone who will be running a workshop attended by people who implement and evaluate programs. She asked me to help her anticipate the main objections raised against doing impact evaluations—evaluations that measure how much of an outcome can be attributed to a specific intervention--and to suggest possible responses.
Poverty fighters unable to attend yesterday’s Massachusetts Avenue Development Seminar here at CGD (video) missed a lively debate between James Foster and Martin Ravallion on the new Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) developed by Foster and co-authors (available online here). This new approach to measuring poverty, which incorporates the
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