This paper proposes an empirical framework that relates poverty reduction to production growth. We use the GGDC/UNU-WIDER Economic Transformation Database measure contribution growth of productivity improvements within sectors and structural change—the reallocation workers across sectors—for 42 developing countries from 1990 2018. Next, contributions are used in a regression analysis, which ind...

Land degradation is a global problem that particularly impacts the poor rural inhabitants of low and middle-income countries. We improve upon existing literature by estimating the extent of rural populations in 2000 and 2010 globally on degrading and improving agricultural land, taking into account the role of market access, and analyzing the resulting impacts on poverty. Using a variety of spa...

With 2015 only eight years away, it is becoming clear that many countries in the developing world will not be able to meet the first Millennium Development Goal (MDG1) of halving absolute poverty. In fact, many countries in Sub-Saharan Africa and several in Asia and Latin America are seriously off track for meeting that goal. In a large number of cases, this is related to poor growth performanc...

Climate change and its possible impacts on the environment and socio-economic systems now constitute the most important environmental problem facing mankind in the 21st century. Climate change will increase poverty and hardship, endanger food security, destabilize economies, decrease food and water and create social insecurity in many countries and undermine our goals for achieving sustainable ...

This paper examines the relationship between minimum wages and poverty in developing countries. We regress changes in poverty indicators for a group of developing countries on minimum wage changes, changes in public spending, human capital investment and other variables associated with changes in poverty. We find that higher minimum wages are associated with lower levels of poverty. This result...

This article summarizes to some extent the predominating Marxist and structuralist schools explanations of the international poverty trap. It also looks at more recent theoretical contributions to this topic, for instance lack of knowledge in underdeveloped countries. For several decades, rich countries tried to give some public assistance to poorer ones, to give them an initial momentum for th...

This paper examines the causal relationship between growth and poverty reduction in developing countries between 1970 and 1998. For this purpose, we apply a modified form of traditional Granger causality tests to suit the short times series that are available, and use panel data model evaluation techniques to test the out-of-sample forecasting performance of competing models. We conclude that t...