Pro-growth, pro-poor : is there a tradeoff?

By Humberto López. 2004

130 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Is a pro-growth strategy always the best pro-poor strategy? To address this issue, the author provides an empirical evaluation of the impact of a series of pro-growth policies on inequality and headcount poverty. He relies on a large macroeconomic data set and estimate dynamic panel models that allows him to differentiate between the short- and long-run impacts of the policies under consideration on growth, inequality, and poverty. The author's findings indicate that regardless of their impact on inequality, pro-growth policies lead to lower poverty levels in the long run. However, he also finds evidence indicating that some of these policies may lead to higher inequality and, under plausible assumptions for the distribution of income, to higher poverty levels in the short run. These findings would justify the adoption of a pro-growth policy package as the center of any poverty reduction strategy, together with pro-poor measures that complement such a package by offsetting potential short-run increases in poverty.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c37187e482237fcd86e9507364cab82ee76644ce

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Citations in the corpus

When is Growth Pro-Poor? Cross-Country Evidence (2004, unknown): “3 For example, Lopez (2003) investigates the determinants of growth and change in the Gini coefficient, and then draws conclusions regarding the likely effects on poverty by assuming that the distribution of income is lognormal, so that there is a one-to-one mapping between the Gini coefficient and…”
Financial Development and Income Inequality: Is There Any Financial Kuznets Curve in Iran? (2014, background): “Similarly, Lopez (2004) also found that better education and low prices seem to decrease income inequality.”
The impact of mobile phone penetration on African inequality (2013, background): “We expect: high inflation to fuel inequality (Albanesi, 2007) while, low inflation should reduce it (Bulir, 1998; Lopez, 2004); GDP growth to reduce inequality conditional on even-distribution of the fruits of economic prosperity; financial depth decreases uneven income distribution (Kai & Hamori,…”
The composition of growth matters for poverty alleviation (2006, background): “The evidence is mounting and comes from various sources: cross-country analyses (Besley and Burgess 2003, Dollar and Kraay 2005, Kraay 2005, and López 2004), cross-regional and time-series comparisons (Ravallion and Chen 2004, Ravallion and Datt 2002), and the evaluation of poverty evolution using…”
Inclusive Growth Analytics: Framework and Application (2009, unknown): “Lopez (2004b) surveys the empirical literature and concludes that macroeconomic stability related to inflation, as well as education and infrastructure-related policies seem to be win-win or ‘super pro-poor’ policies that have both a positive effect on growth and a negative effect on inequality.”
Quality of Government: What You Get (2009, result): “For example, while some studies show that a high QoG leads to greater income inequality (Lopez 2004), other studies show the reverse (Gupta, Davoodi, Alonso-Terme 2002).”