Measuring Pro-Poor Growth

By M. Ravallion, Shaohua Chen. 2003

1,253 citations recorded by the source corpus.

It is important to know how aggregate economic growth or contraction was distributed according to initial levels of living. In particular, to what extent can it be said that growth was"pro-poor?"There are problems with past methods of addressing this question, notably that the measures used are inconsistent with the properties that are considered desirable for a measure of the level of poverty. The authors provide some new tools for assessing to what extent the aggregate growth process in an economy is pro-poor. The key measurement tools is the"growth incidence curve,"which gives growth rates by quantiles (such as percentiles) ranked by income. Taking the area under this curve up to the headcount index of poverty gives a measure of the rate of pro-poor growth consistent with the Watts index for the level of poverty. The authors give examples using survey data for China during the 1990s. Over 1990-99, the ordinary growth rate of household income per capita in China was 7 percent a year. The growth rate by quantile varied from 3 percent for the poorest percentile to 11 percent for the richest, while the rate of pro-poor growth was around 4 percent. The pattern was reversed for a few years in the mid-1990s, when the rate of pro-poor growth rose to 10 percent a year--above the ordinary growth rate of 8 percent.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/7c2c34cfa4019c6081945002bbf566c314252e8e

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Citations in the corpus

Removing the anonymity axiom in assessing pro-poor growth (2007, positive): “If the GIC lies above zero everywhere (gt(p) > 0 ∀ p) then there is first-order dominance of the distribution at date 1See, for instance McCulloch and Baulch (2000), Kakwani, Khandker and Son (2003), Kakwani and Pernia (2000), Ravallion and Chen (2003) and Klasen (2004).”
Economic Mobility and the Rise of the Latin American Middle Class (2012, background): “Panama show slightly more intergenerational mobility but are well below the cross-country PISA average. This result is consistent with findings in Ferreira and Gignoux (2011), which uses the R-squared of a similar regression to gauge the extent of (in)equality of opportunities in Latin America with ”
Inclusive Growth Analytics: Framework and Application (2009, neutral): “2 (Ravallion and Chen, 2003).”
Beyond Oaxaca–Blinder: Accounting for differences in household income distributions (2008, neutral): “These counterfactual income change functions are analogous to the growth incidence curves often presented in the recent development literature (see Ravallion and Chen [36]).”
In Search of the Holy Grail: How to Achieve Pro-Poor Growth? (2003, background): “There is a close relation to the proposal by Ravallion and Chen (2003) and those growth rates.”
Inclusive Growth: Measurement and Determinants (2013, background): “Under the absolute definition, growth is considered to be pro-poor as long as poor people benefit in absolute terms, as reflected in some agreed measures of poverty (Ravallion and Chen, 2003).”
When is Growth Pro-Poor? Cross-Country Evidence (2004, neutral): “Ravallion and Chen (2003) propose this definition and apply it to a particular poverty measure, the Watts index.”
Poverty Equivalent Growth Rate (2008, methodology): “Ravallion and Chen (2003) is the only measure in the literature which is comparable to the proposed PEGR.”
Global Income Distribution: From the Fall of the Berlin Wall to the Great Recession (2013, neutral): “Perhaps a more useful way to illustrate this pattern is through a variant of the global GIC (Ravallion and Chen 2003).”
Economic Growth and Poverty Reduction: Measurement Issues using Income and Non-Income Indicators (2008, neutral): “ Based on these growth incidence curves, Tables 5 and 6 calculate rates of pro‐poor growth using the Ravallion and Chen (2003) approach for the various income and conditional and unconditional non‐income indicators (using a moderate poverty headcount of 77 per cent and an …”
Inclusive Development: Two Papers on Conceptualization, Application, and the ADB Perspective (2010, background): “Here is a selection: World Bank (1994), Canning (1998), Reinikka and Svensson (1999), Haughwout (2002), Wang (2002), Canning and Pedroni (2004)”
Rural development and poverty reduction: is agriculture still the key? (2007, background): “Both Ravallion and Chen (2003) and Kakwani et al. (2004) propose formulas to measure “pro-poor growth” that involve scaling up or down the observed growth rate by a factor that is greater (less) than one if inequality has been reduced (increased).”