Ideas to Action:
Independent research for global prosperity
Who are the world’s poor? This paper presents a new global profile of multidimensional poverty using three specifications of multidimensional poverty.
Emerging economies face a contemporary challenge to traditional pathways to employment generation: automation, digitalization, and labor-saving technologies. 1.8 billion jobs—or two-thirds of the current labor force of developing countries—are estimated to be susceptible to automation from today’s technological standpoint.
This paper argues that approximately three-quarters of global poverty, at least at the lower poverty lines, could now be eliminated—in principle—via redistribution of nationally available resources. Reducing global poverty at lower poverty lines is increasingly a matter of national inequality.
This paper considers the effectiveness and efficiency of global growth, as a route to poverty reduction, since 1990 and then demonstrates the redistributive challenges implicit in various poverty lines and scenarios.
This paper makes new estimates of global poverty and inequality in 2012 using both ‘old’, 2005 and ‘new’, 2011 purchasing power parity (PPP) price data in order to assess systematically what difference PPP data makes to the estimates.
This paper focuses on aid effectiveness. The paper considers peer-reviewed, cross-country, econometric studies, published over the last decade in order to propose areas with policy implications related to the conditions under which aid is more likely to be effective.
Many existing classifications of developing countries are dominated by income per capita (such as the World Bank’s low, middle and high income thresholds), thus neglecting the multidimensionality of the concept of ‘development’. Even those deemed to be the main ‘alternatives’ to the income-based classification have income per capita heavily weighted within a composite indicator.
In this paper we explore the Palma and corroborate the findings that the middle does indeed hold over time and through various stages of tax and transfers. Further, we find that the Gini is almost completely “explained” by only two points of the distribution: the same income shares which determine the Palma.
In this paper, we propose and justify an alternative approach based on four consumption “layers” identified by reference to the global consumption distribution.We consider how each layer of global society has fared since the end of the Cold War.
This is the data set for Working Paper 327, “The Future of Global Poverty in a Multi-Speed World: New Estimates of Scale and Location, 2010–2030,” in which Peter Edward and Andy Sumner introduce new model of growth, inequality, and poverty that allows comparison of a wide range of input assumptions.
In this working paper, Peter Edward and Andy Sumner introduce new model of growth, inequality, and poverty that comparison of a wide range of input assumptions. They find that it is plausible that $1.25 and $2 global poverty will reduce substantially by 2030 and the former – $1.25 poverty – could be very low by that time. However, this depends a lot on economic growth and inequality trends—up to almost an extra billion $2 poor people in one scenario.
Middle-income countries are now home to most of the world’s extreme poor and to what Andy Sumner calls the “buoyant billions”—those living on between $2 and $10 a day. Sumner follows the trends and implications.
Most of the world’s extreme poor live in countries classified by the World Bank as middle-income countries. This apparent “poverty paradox” has important implications. For one, middle-income countries have substantially more domestic resources available to fight poverty than low-income countries do.
The paper outlines potential goal areas based on the original Millennium Declaration, the timeframe for any MDGs 2.0 and attempts to calculate some reasonable targets associated with those goal areas.
After a decade of rapid economic growth, many developing countries have attained middle-income status, but poverty reduction in these countries has not kept pace with economic growth. Most of the world’s poor—up to a billion people—now live in these new middle-income countries. These countries also carry the majority of the global disease burden.
This paper reflects on the global goal setting experience of the MDGs and what might be done differently if there is new round of MDGs after 2015.
After a decade of rapid growth in average incomes, many countries have attained middle-income country (MIC) status, while poverty hasn’t fallen as much as one might expect. As a result, there are up to a billion poor people or a ‘new bottom billion’ living not in the world’s poorest countries but in MIC. Not only has the global distribution of poverty shifted to MIC, so has the global disease burden. The paper describes trends in the global distribution of poverty, preventable infectious diseases, and health aid response to date and proposes a new MIC strategy and components, concluding with recommendations.
Most of the world’s poor no longer live in low-income countries. An estimated 960 million poor people—a new bottom billion—live in middle-income countries, a result of the graduation of several populous countries from low-income status. That is good news, but it has repercussions. Donors will have to change the way they think about poverty alleviation. They should design development aid to benefit poor people, not just poor countries, keep supporting middle-income countries, think beyond traditional aid to craft coherent development policies, and work to help create space for more inclusive policy processes in new and old MICs.
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