In 2013, the World Bank adopted two new goals to guide its work: ending extreme poverty and boosting shared prosperity. More specifically, the goals are to reduce extreme poverty in the world to less than 3 percent by 2030, and to foster income growth of the bottom 40 percent of the population in each country. While poverty reduction has been a mainstay of the World Bank’s mission for decades, the Bank has now set a specific goal and timetable, and for the first time, the Bank has explicitly included a goal linked to ensuring that growth is shared by all. The discussion until now has centered primarily on articulating the new goals.
New report “A Measured Approach to Ending Poverty and Boosting Shared Prosperity: Concepts, Data, and the Twin Goals”, the latest in World Bank’s Policy Research Report series, goes beyond that and lays out their conceptual underpinnings, discusses their relative strengths and weaknesses by contrasting them with alternative indicators, and proposes empirical approaches and requirements to track progress towards the goals. The report makes clear that the challenges posed by the World Bank’s new stance extend not just to the pursuit of these goals but, indeed, to their very definition and empirical content. The report also argues that an improved data infrastructure, consisting of many elements including the collection of more and better survey data, is critical to ensure that progress towards these goals can be measured, and policies to help achieve them can be identified and prioritized. The main author of the report, Dean Jolliffe, Senior Economist, World Bank’s Development Research Group, introduced the key points of the report.
Presentation
- A Measured Approach to Ending Poverty and Boosting Shared Prosperity Concepts, Data, and the Twin Goals (PDF)
Dean Jolliffe, Senior Economist, Development Research Group, World Bank Group
- Comments: A Measured Approach to Ending Poverty and Boosting Shared ProsperityConcepts, Data, and the Twin Goals (PDF)
Yasuyuki Sawada, Professor, Graduate School of Economics, The University of Tokyo
Report
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A photo from the seminar |
Speaker
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Dean Jolliffe Senior Economist, Development Research Group, World Bank Group |
Dean Jolliffe is a Senior Economist in the Development Research Group of the World Bank and member of the LSMS-ISA team. He has extensive experience in the design and implementation of household surveys and is currently managing ongoing LSMS-ISA work in Ethiopia. He has also worked in the South Asia region at the Bank on poverty assessments for Afghanistan, Bangladesh and Nepal.
Previously, he was a Research Economist at the Economic Research Service of USDA, an Adjunct Professor at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies, an Assistant Professor at the Center for Economic Research and Graduate Education in Prague, and a Post-doctoral Fellow at the International Food Policy Research Institute. Dean holds appointments as a Research Fellow with the Institute for the Study of Labor in Bonn, and as a Research Affiliate with the National Poverty Center at the University of Michigan. He received his Ph.D. in economics from Princeton University.
Commentator
Yasuyuki Sawada, Professor, Graduate School of Economics, The University of Tokyo