TY - BOOK ID - 133874979 TI - Measuring The Pro-Poorness of Income Growth Within An Elasticity Framework AU - Essama-Nssah, B. AU - Lambert, Peter J. PY - 2006 PB - Washington, D.C., The World Bank, DB - UniCat KW - Developing World KW - Development Goals KW - Development Policy KW - Distributional Impact KW - Economic Growth KW - Growth Pattern KW - Growth Process KW - Growth Rate KW - Growth Rates KW - Health, Nutrition and Population KW - Income Growth KW - Income Poverty KW - Inequality KW - Non-Income Dimensions KW - Policy Research KW - Population Policies KW - Poverty KW - Poverty Impact KW - Poverty Measure KW - Poverty Reduction KW - Pro-Poor KW - Pro-Poor Growth KW - Relative Gains KW - Rural Development KW - Rural Poverty Reduction KW - Services and Transfers to Poor UR - https://www.unicat.be/uniCat?func=search&query=sysid:133874979 AB - Poverty reduction has become a fundamental objective of development, and therefore a metric for assessing the effectiveness of various interventions. Economic growth can be a powerful instrument of income poverty reduction. This creates a need for meaningful ways of assessing the poverty impact of growth. This paper follows the elasticity approach to propose a measure of pro-poorness defined as a weighted average of the deviation of a growth pattern from the benchmark case. The measure can help assess pro-poorness both in terms of aggregate poverty measures, which are members of the additively separable class, and at percentiles. It also lends itself to a decomposition procedure, whereby the overall pattern of income growth can be unbundled, and the contributions of income components to overall pro-poorness identified. An application to data for Indonesia in the 1990s reveals that the amount of poverty reduction achieved over that period remains far below what would have been achieved under distributional neutrality. This conclusion is robust to the choice of a poverty measure among members of the additively separable class, and can be tracked back to changes in expenditure components. ER -