The Economics of Poverty: History, Measurement, and Policy

Ravallion, Martin

ISBN 10: 0190212772 / ISBN 13: 9780190212773

Published by Oxford University Press, 2016

About this Item

Seller Inventory # mon0004075766

Bibliographic Details

• Title: The Economics of Poverty: History, Measurement, and Policy
• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Publication Date: 2016
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0190212772
• ISBN 13: 9780190212773
• Binding: paperback
• Condition: Very Good

About this title

Synopsis

There are fewer people living in extreme poverty in the world today than 30 years ago. While that is an achievement, continuing progress for poor people is far from assured. Inequalities in access to key resources threaten to stall growth and poverty reduction in many places. The world's poorest have made only a small absolute gain over those 30 years. Progress has been slow against relative poverty as judged by the standards of the country and time one lives in, and a great many people in the world's emerging middle class remain vulnerable to falling back into poverty.

The Economics of Poverty reviews critically past and present debates on poverty, spanning both rich and poor countries. The book provides an accessible new synthesis of current economic thinking on key questions: How is poverty measured? How much poverty is there? Why does poverty exist, and is it inevitable? What can be done to reduce poverty? Can it even be eliminated? The book does not assume that readers know economics already. Those new to the subject get a lot of help along the way in understanding its concepts and methods. Economics lives through its relevance to real world problems, and here the problem of poverty is both the central focus and a vehicle for learning.

About the Author

Martin Ravallion holds the inaugural Edmond D. Villani Chair of Economics at Georgetown University, prior to which he was the Director of the World Bank's research department. He has advised numerous governments and international agencies on poverty and policies for fighting it, and he has written extensively on this and other subjects in economics, including four books and 200 papers in scholarly journals and edited volumes. He is President of the Society for the Study of Economic Inequality. Amongst various prizes and awards, in 2012 he was awarded the John Kenneth Galbraith Prize from the American Agricultural and Applied Economics Association.