The role of product market reforms in achieving the objective of higher employment and growth has recently received much attention amongst academics. The aim of this paper is to analyse some of the channels through which cross-market effects come about and to assess their policy relevance. The analytic strategy of this paper relies upon the stochastic real options modelling approach. In a nutsh...

Inequity and power imbalances, adverse employment conditions and the lack of economic opportunities or control over assets are all manifestations of peoples' disempowerment and contribute to their poverty. This Policy Guidance Note considers the causal relationship between empowerment and pro-poor growth. It identifies eight domains of empowerment within three spheres: the economic (markets, de...

There is a long history in economic development with regard to the roles of various sectors in development and the choice of strategic sectors for development. This paper is principally concerned with reviewing recent empirical studies on the contribution of agriculture to national growth and to poverty reduction. The outcomes of interest are economywide, although we are examining the agricultu...

This paper summarizes and synthesizes some literature that picks up and extends the discussion of Dollar and Kraay (2000). While most of the theory has been known for a long time, the empirical material that has gradually become available in the past decade or so in the form of household budget surveys has made it possible to paint a more detailed and nuanced picture than the one usually availa...

Using micro-level panel data from villages in rural Ethiopia, the paper uses standard decompositions of income changes and develops a new decomposition of poverty changes to analyse the determinants of growth and poverty changes during a period of economic reform (1989-95). Consumption grew and poverty fell substantially, but the experience was mixed. I find that common and idiosyncratic shocks...

This paper examines three possible approaches to pro-poor growth. The first one assumes that the poverty line remains constant in real terms over time. The second perspective examines the case where the poverty line is equal to half the median of the income distribution but assumes that such a poverty line is determined exogenously. Finally the authors also propose a third type of decomposition...

Is a pro-growth strategy always the best pro-poor strategy? To address this issue, this paper provides an empirical evaluation of the impact of a series of pro-growth policies on inequality and headcount poverty. We rely on a large macroeconomic data set and estimate dynamic panel models that allow us to differentiate between the shortand longrun impacts of the policies under consideration on g...

This paper re-examines the Dollar and Kraay (2002) result that per capita real income for the poorest quintile in a country grows equiproportionately with the rest of the economy. Results obtained here using the Dollar and Kraay data set indicate that the real per capita income of the poor rises less than proportionately when growth is positive and falls dramatically when growth is negative. Th...