Public policy aimed at building capacity among the extremely poor (support for food and nutrition; health; education and, more recently, financial services), combined with a stable macroeconomic environment, has proved to be successful for poverty alleviation in Mexico. Even though overall poverty is still very pronounced, about four million people originally in extreme or intermediate poverty ...

Despite remarkable achievements in fighting poverty in the past three decades, numerous challenges remain for the People’s Republic of China. The country’s antipoverty efforts are in a key phase of strategic reorientation. This paper analyzes lessons learned from poverty reduction programs in the country and identifies key areas to be addressed in the next decade. The paper proposes seven polic...

We study absolute income poverty measurement when agents differ in preferences and face different prices. The difficulty arising from price heterogeneity is typically solved using equivalent income, but the choice of the reference price vector remains arbitrary. We provide a way to solve this arbitrariness problem by making the poverty measure consistent with preferences: an agent qualifies as ...

Information poverty is a new form of poverty in information society. With the growing information-gap between urban and rural areas, information poverty is prevailing in the vast rural areas in China. It is largely restricted the new rural construction and the social harmonious development of villages and towns and must be resolved. The evaluation of rural information poverty is the premise to ...

Applying the Shapley decomposition to unit-record household survey data, this paper investigates the trends and causes of poverty in China in the 1990s. The changes in poverty trends are attributed to two proximate causes; income growth and shifts in relative income distribution. The Foster-Greer-Thorbecke measures are computed and decomposed, with different datasets and alternative assumptions...

BACKGROUND The link between poverty and adverse maternal outcomes has been studied largely by means of quantitative data. We explore poor urban Kenyan women's views and lived experiences of the relationship between economic disadvantage and unpleasant maternal outcomes. METHOD Secondary analysis of focus group discussions and in-depth individual interviews data with women in two slums in Nair...