The World Bank's approach to estimating the extent, distribution and trend of global income poverty is neither meaningful nor reliable. The Bank uses an arbitrary international poverty line that is not adequately anchored in any specification of the real requirements of human beings. Moreover, it employs a concept of purchasing power equivalence that is neither well defined nor appropriate for poverty assessment. These difficulties are inherent in the Bank's "money-metric" approach and cannot be credibly overcome without dispensing with this approach altogether. In addition, the Bank extrapolates incorrectly from limited data and thereby creates an appearance of precision that masks the high probable error of its estimates. It is difficult to judge the nature and extent of the errors in global poverty estimates that these three flaws produce. However, there is reason to believe that the Bank's approach may have led it to understate the extent of global income poverty and to infer without adequate justification that global income poverty has steeply declined in the recent period. A new methodology of global poverty assessment, focused directly on what is needed to achieve elementary human requirements, is feasible and necessary. A practical approach to implementing an alternative is described.

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How Not to Count the Poor

Recent empirical and theoretical literature sheds light on the disappointing experience with implementation of primary health care programs in developing countries. This article focuses on the evidence showing two weak links in the chain between government spending for services to improve health and actual improvements in health status. First, institutional capacity is a vital ingredient in providing effective services. When this capacity is inadequate, health spending, even on the right services, may lead to little actual provision of services. Second, the net effect of government health services depends on the severity of market failures-the more severe the market failures, the greater the potential for government services to have an impact. Evidence suggests that market failures are the least severe for relatively inexpensive curative services, which often absorb the bulk of primary health care budgets. A companion paper, available from the authors, offers a perspective on how government funds can best be used to improve health and wellbeing in developing countries. It gives an alternative view of appropriate public health policy, one that focuses on mitigating the characteristic market failures of the sector and tailoring public health activities to the government's ability to deliver various services.

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Weak links in the chain: A diagnosis of health policy in poor countries

Civil war is very common in the develop-ing world, with harmful welfare effects when it occurs. Many fear that the devastation wrought by violent conflict destroys social capital, impedes economic development, and leads to the recur-rence of violence (Paul Collier et al. 2003).In response, donors are injecting large amounts of aid into post-conflict countries. A significant share of this assistance is spent on “community-driven reconstruction” (CDR) programs, which support the establishment of new local institu -tions in order to promote social reconciliation. Whether this assistance has this effect is, how -ever, largely unknown. Can brief, foreign-funded efforts to build local institutions in fact have posi -tive effects on local patterns of cooperation?We address this question using a randomized field experiment to evaluate the impact of a CDR project in northern Liberia. The project was funded by the United Kingdom’s Department for International Development (DFID) and imple-mented by the International Rescue Committee (IRC). The project attempted to build demo-cratic, community-level institutions for making and implementing decisions about local public goods. This model of support for participatory processes to enhance local public goods provi-

/pdf/can-development-aid-contribute-to-social-cohesion-after-2a41dpinoi.pdf

Can Development Aid Contribute to Social Cohesion after Civil War? Evidence from a Field Experiment in Post-conflict Liberia

The impact of rapid population growth on economic development in third world countries is explored. "Section I provides an empirical point of reference by summarizing some of the salient demographic trends in the Third World. Section II takes up analytical perspectives useful to assessing the impacts of population on development. A preliminary empirical appraisal of the relationship between population and economic growth is provided in Section III followed in Sections IV-VI by an examination of the effects of demographic change on the scale of production the rate of saving and the composition of investment and the rate and form of technical change in agriculture. Section VII concludes with a summary assessment and some qualifications relating to government policies ecology and values." (EXCERPT)

/pdf/economic-consequences-of-population-change-in-the-third-43u8ade60v.pdf

Economic Consequences of Population Change in the Third World

This paper presents new data on poverty, inequality, and growth in those developing countries of the world for which the requisite statistics are available. Economic growth is found generally but not always to reduce poverty. Growth, however, is found to have very little to do with income inequality. Thus the "economic laws" linking the rate of growth and the distribution of benefits receive only very tenuous empirical support here. Copyright 1989 by Oxford University Press.

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Changes in poverty and inequality in developing countries

Purchasing power parities (PPPs) are the correct converters for translating gross domestic product (GDP) and its components from own-currencies to dollars; the alternative measure, exchange rates, obscures the relationship between the quantity aggregates of different countries. Drawing on the reports of the United Nationals International Comparison Project (ICP), the article contends that exchange rates systematically understate the purchasing power of the currencies of low-income countries and thus exaggerate the dispersion of national per capita incomes. Where full-scale PPP estimates are not available, estimates based on shortcut methods better approximate what the benchmark estimates would be than do the exchange rate conversions. The ICP results also illuminate price and exchange rate relationships among countries by providing a measure of the difference in the levels of prices in different countries. ICP price comparisons for components GDP make possible the analysis of comparative price and quantity structures of different countries and provide the raw materials for many types of analytical studies.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/info/3986306

The three faces of the international comparison project

The three faces of the international comparison project. Agricultural mechanization: a comparative historical perspective. Aid in the development process. Stabilization policies in developing countries. The public stabilization of education and health in developing countries: a review of equity and efficiency.

Irving B. Kravis

Papers

The three faces of the international comparison project

The World Bank research observer 1 (1)