Growth Still Is Good for the Poor

By David L. Dollar, T. Kleineberg, Aart C. Kraay. 2013

432 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Incomes in the poorest two quintiles on average increase at the same rate as overall average incomes. This is because, in a global dataset spanning 118 countries over the past four decades, changes in the share of income of the poorest quintiles are generally small and uncorrelated with changes in average income. The variation in changes in quintile shares is also small relative to the variation in growth in average incomes, implying that the latter accounts for most of the variation in income growth in the poorest quintiles. These findings hold across most regions and time periods and when conditioning on a variety of country-level factors that may matter for growth and inequality changes. This evidence confirms the central importance of economic growth for poverty reduction and illustrates the difficulty of identifying specific macroeconomic policies that are significantly associated with the relative growth rates of those in the poorest quintiles.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Management, Monitoring, Policy and Law, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/2f8597608f067e81d16e78aa8c7c7225b2feaf44

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Economics and Econometrics

In Management, Monitoring, Policy and Law

In Sociology and Political Science

Citations in the corpus

Why Don't Remittances Appear to Affect Growth? (2014, neutral): “14 countries, Dollar et al. (2013) show that growth of the incomes of the bottom 20 percent, and bottom 40 percent of the income distribution on average move one for one with average growth.”
Inclusive Growth in cities: a sympathetic critique (2018, background): “This is a problem in the developing world where, despite the concept having been used for some time, there is little evidence on the appropriate policy mix to make growth Inclusive (Dollar et al., 2013).”
A Quality of Growth Index for Developing Countries: A Proposal (2014, neutral): “The strength of growth is an important aspect of the quality of growth since high growth is a necessary ingredient to put a dent to poverty (Dollar and Kraay, 2002; Dollar et al., 2013).”
DOES GOVERNMENT SPENDING AFFECT INCOME INEQUALITY? A META‐REGRESSION ANALYSIS (2017, neutral): “A recent update of this study, by Dollar et al (2013), found similar results.”
From Poverty to Disaster and Back: a Review of the Literature (2020, background): “Aggregate economic growth is the main driver of poverty reduction over time (Dollar et al. 2013; Dollar and Kraay 2002), and so any impact of disasters on economic growth has direct implications for poverty.”
Poverty and climate change: introduction (2018, background): “It is therefore no surprise that natural disasters have a well-documented impact on poverty (see reviews in Karim andNoy, 2014; Hallegatte et al., 2017). For example, at the municipal level inMexico, Rodriguez-Oreggia et al. (2013) find that floods and droughts increased poverty between 1.”
Is It All About the Tails? The Palma Measure of Income Inequality (2013, neutral): “…2006; Ravallion, 2005) so while it may be the case that growth (still) is good for the poor in a general sense or at least the poorest 40% (see Dollar et al., 2013), growth is likely to be better for the poor in countries with lower initial income inequality or where income inequality is…”
Towards nexus-based governance: defining interactions between economic activities and Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) (2020, background): “Growth is critical for improving living standards, and it typically is good for the poor (Dollar et al. 2013), as witnessed by the role economic growth played in helping lift more than one billion people out of poverty since 1990 (World Bank 2018).”