Measuring Pro-Poor Growth

Ravallion, Martin ; Chen, Shaohua

World Bank, Washington, DC

关键词: AVERAGE INCOMES;    CAPITAL CONTROLS;    COUNTRY SIZE;    CRIME;    CUMULATIVE DISTRIBUTION;   

DOI  :  10.1596/1813-9450-2666
RP-ID  :  WPS2666

学科分类：社会科学、人文和艺术（综合）

来源: World Bank Open Knowledge Repository

【 摘 要 】

It is important to know how aggregateeconomic growth or contraction was distributed according toinitial levels of living. In particular, to what extent canit be said that growth was "pro-poor?" There areproblems with past methods of addressing this question,notably that the measures used are inconsistent with theproperties that are considered desirable for a measure ofthe level of poverty. The authors provide some new tools forassessing to what extent the aggregate growth process in aneconomy is pro-poor. The key measurement tools is the"growth incidence curve," which gives growth ratesby quantiles (such as percentiles) ranked by income. Takingthe area under this curve up to the headcount index ofpoverty gives a measure of the rate of pro-poor growthconsistent with the Watts index for the level of poverty.The authors give examples using survey data for China duringthe 1990s. Over 1990-99, the ordinary growth rate ofhousehold income per capita in China was 7 percent a year.The growth rate by quantile varied from 3 percent for thepoorest percentile to 11 percent for the richest, while therate of pro-poor growth was around 4 percent. The patternwas reversed for a few years in the mid-1990s, when the rateof pro-poor growth rose to 10 percent a year--above theordinary growth rate of 8 percent.