Economic Mobility And Poverty Dynamics In Developing Countries

A collection of studies assembled from six countries - South Africa, China, Ethiopia, Pakistan, Zimbabwe and Chile - using household panel data to examine the issue of poverty. The studies suggest that populations often swing in and out of poverty due to changes in business and agriculture.

Identifies the ways in which private firms and farms contribute to economic mobility and poverty reduction and what governments can do to enhance this contribution.

How private firms contribute to economic mobility and poverty reduction and what governments can do to enhance their contributions is the theme of this book. The positive role (often underemphasized) the private sector plays in economic development is looked at. Also the labour market and how various mechanisms in the economy interact to affect conditions for people as workers and as consumers. The links among the business environment, private sector development, economic growth, poverty reduction and economic mobility are also examined.

This book brings together the latest thinking about poverty dynamics from diverse analytic traditions. While covering a vast body of conceptual and empirical knowledge about economic and social mobility, it takes the reader on compelling journeys of multigenerational accounts of three villages in Kanartaka, India, twelve years in the life of a street child in Burkina Faso, and much more. Leading development practitioners and scholars from the fields of anthropology, economics, political science, and sociology critically examine the literature from their disciplines and contribute new frameworks and evidence from their own works. The 'Moving Out of Poverty' series launched in 2007 is under the editorial direction of Deepa Narayan, Senior Advisor of the World Bank and former director of the pathbreaking 'Voices of the Poor' series. It features the results of new comparative research across more than 500 communities in 15 countries to understand how and why people move out of poverty, and presents other work which builds on interdisciplinary and contextually grounded understandings of growth and poverty reduction.

Why Poverty Persists significantly advances our understanding of the temporal dimensions of poverty. Its judicious mix of new evidence and improved methods offers new insights into why some people remain mired in poverty and the forces that keep them there. All those interested in combating poverty - academics, donors and those working in the non-governmental organizations - will learn from the carefully constructed African and Asian case studies presented. John Hoddinott, International Food Policy Research Institute, Washington DC, US Ten years ago Bob Baulch and John Hoddinott drew our attention to the phenomenon of poverty dynamics" - an insight into the unpredictability of poor peoples livelihoods that had profound implications for poverty thinking and policy, forcing a rethink of static conceptualisations and measurement and raising challenges for targeting anti-poverty programmes. In this new volume, Baulch and colleagues enrich this understanding with rigorous analysis of panel datasets from six countries in Africa and Asia. Most impressively, this illuminating collection by technical microeconometricians is equally accessible to non-technical readers, which effectively communicates its important messages to development policy-makers and practitioners. Stephen Devereux, University of Sussex, UK This volume on poverty dynamics in developing countries, whose authors include the leaders in this field, is a must for analysts and research students. It advances the literature by addressing three important issues - measurement error, attrition, and tracking. For each of these questions, the volume leads by example, showing how they can be handled in specific cases. The results show that escape from poverty is a diverse phenomenon, and establish the importance of country and context specificity. The volume provide an analytical platform for careful policy assessment of policy alternatives. Ravi Kanbur, Cornell University, US At the beginning of the 2000-2010 decade, Bob Baulch (with John Hoddinott) was setting the micro-econometric agenda on poverty dynamics and chronic poverty and producing work that "non-economists" had to read if they wanted to conduct serious research on these issues. In this volume - though his analytical excellence, the pursuit and methodological rigour, extraordinary energy, and his ability to lead such a distinguished network of colleagues - Bob Baulch has set the research agenda on poverty dynamics and chronic poverty for the next ten years. - From the foreword by David Hulme, University of Manchester,UK

Estimates of income inequality and the dynamics of poverty are highly sensitive to measurement error and transitory shocks in micro-level data. The apparent high levels of economic mobility in Poland and Russia are driven largely by transitory shocks and noisy data. There is a real risk of an entrenched underclass emerging in these transition economies.

This collection of essays provides a state-of-the-art examination of the concepts and methods that can be used to understand poverty dynamics. It does this from an interdisciplinary perspective and includes the work of anthropologists, economists, sociologists, and political scientists. The contributions included highlight the need to conceptualise poverty from a multidimensional perspective and promote Q-Squared research approaches, or those that combine quantitative and qualitative research. The first part of the book provides a review of the research on poverty dynamics in developing countries. Part two focuses on poverty measurement and assessment, and discusses the most recent work of world-leading poverty analysts. The third part focuses on frameworks for understanding poverty analysis that avoid measurement and instead utilise approaches based on social relations and structural analysis. There is widespread consensus that poverty analysis should focus on poverty dynamics and this book shows how this idea can practically be taken forward.