Commission on Global Poverty

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Monitoring Global Poverty Report Now Available

October 18, 2016 — The recommendations on how to more comprehensively measure and monitor global poverty in the light of the Bank’s goals of ending extreme poverty by 2030 and boosting shared prosperity are now available. Read More »

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Commission on Global Poverty Discusses Findings of Interim Report

July 12, 2016 — Watch the discussion of the Commission on Global Poverty's interim report, findings & recommendations. Read More »

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About
Core Group Members
Advisory Board Members

Background

In 2013, the World Bank Group announced two goals that would guide its development work worldwide. The first is to end extreme poverty, that is, to bring the number of extremely poor people, defined as those living on less than $1.90 dollars a day (in 2011 Purchasing Power Parity), to less than 3% of the world population by 2030. The second is to boost shared prosperity, defined as promoting the growth of per capita real income of the poorest 40% of the population in each country.

In September 2015, UN member nations agreed to a set of post-2015 Sustainable Development Goals (SDG), the first and foremost of which is the eradication of extreme poverty everywhere, in all its forms. Both the language and the spirit of the SDG objective reflect the growing acceptance of the idea that poverty is a multi-dimensional concept that reflects multiple deprivations in various aspects of well-being. That said, there is much less agreement on the best ways in which those deprivations should be measured; and on whether or how information on them should be aggregated.

Objective

In this context, the World Bank Group’s Chief Economist decided to convene a high-level commission, the objective of which was to advise the Bank on how to measure and monitor global poverty with the above background in mind. The Commission’s final report provided advice to the Sr. Vice President and Chief Economist and Senior Management more broadly, in mid-October, 2016.

The Commission focused on a few main areas, outlined below, as well as other related ideas as deemed fit by the Chair of the Commission:

1. The first is relatively technical. Since the goal of trying to end extreme chronic poverty by 2030 has already been set, advice is being sought on the meaning of “holding constant” the poverty line in real terms. What does it mean to hold the line constant at $1.25 PPP-adjusted (2005), which was the extreme poverty line when the goal was set, when prices are changing, as are exchange rates? Every time new PPP indices become available (as happened in 2005 and 2011), we have to contend with the meaning of how the line itself should be adjusted to account for this, and indeed, in 2015, the international extreme poverty line was updated to $1.90 in 2011 PPP to reflect newly available price data.

Further, should we use the standard PPP indices or make corrections for the fact that the poor do not consume the same basket of goods as the average person in a society?

2. The second question asks the Commission to go beyond the above poverty measure (that we have to track given our commitment to the target based on it) to more general advice on other kinds of poverty the Bank should track and use to guide policy. Should we track poverty based on other lines--$4, $10, and so on? Should we be concerned about the depth of poverty below the line? Should we collect and collate data on the many human and social dimensions of poverty that go beyond the money metric? Should these be aggregated or left as vectors? With these broader questions there will be associated need for data collection and analysis. The Commission may give advice on these data gaps as well.

The World Bank plays an important role in shaping the global debate on combatting poverty, and the indicators and data the Bank collates and makes available shape opinion and policies in client countries, and, internationally. How we answer the above questions can therefore have a major influence on the global economy. Read the Commission’s recommendations, and the World Bank Group’s response. (updated October 2016).

Sir Anthony Atkinson, Chair

Oxford University and London School of Economics
Sir Anthony Atkinson, is Centennial Professor at the London School of Economics and Fellow of Nuffield College, Oxford. He was previously Warden of the College. He is Fellow of the British Academy, and has been President of the Royal Economic Society, of the Econometric Society, of the European Economic Association and of the International Economic Association. He is an Honorary Member of the American Economic Association. He has served on the Royal Commission on the Distribution of Income and Wealth, the Pension Law Review Committee, and the Commission on Social Justice. He has been a member of the Conseil d’Analyse Economique, advising the French Prime Minister. He is a Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur. He is the author of Unequal Shares, The Economics of Inequality, Poverty and Social Security, Public Economics in Action, Incomes and the Welfare State, Poverty in Europe, The Economic Consequences of Rolling Back the Welfare State, Social Indicators: The EU and Social Inclusion (with B Cantillon, E Marlier and B Nolan), The Changing Distribution of Earnings in OECD Countries, Public Economics in an Age of Austerity, and Inequality: What Can be Done? which was recently published. He has published articles in, among other scientific journals, the Review of Economic Studies, the Journal of Economic Theory, the Quarterly Journal of Economics, the Economic Journal, the Scandinavian Journal of Economics, and the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society. He was the editor of the Journal of Public Economics for 25 years.
Andrea Brandolini

Bank of Italy
Andrea Brandolini has been working at the Bank of Italy, the Italian central bank, since 1992. He is currently the Head of the Statistical Analysis Directorate in the DG Economics, Statistics and Research. He represented the Bank of Italy in the Poverty Commissions established by Italian governments (1994-2007) and in the Working Group on Minimum Income at the Ministry of Labor and Social Policies (2013). He chaired the Istat’s Commission on the absolute poverty methodology (2006-09) and he is a member of the Istat’s Scientific Committee on the Measurement of Well-Being (since 2011). He was the Italian representative in the Luxembourg Income Study, where he sat in the Executive Board (1997-2009) and directed with Timothy M. Smeeding the Luxembourg Wealth Study, a pilot project aimed at constructing a harmonized cross-national database of micro information on household wealth (2004-07). He chaired the council of the International Association for Research in Income and Wealth (IARIW) and sat in the council of the Society for the Study of Economic Inequality (ECINEQ). He is a fellow of the Human Development and Capability Association (HDCA) and a policy fellow of the Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA). He is associate editor of the Journal of Economic Inequality and a member of the editorial boards of the Review of Income and Wealth, the Italian Economic Journal and Politica economica–Journal of Economic Policy. He has published papers on the analysis of poverty and income and wealth distribution, the measurement of well-being, issues in labor economics, and the history of economic thought. He co-edited, with S.P. Jenkins, J. Micklewright and B. Nolan, The Great Recession and the Distribution of Household Income (Oxford University Press, 2013).
François Bourguignon

Paris School of Economics
François Bourguignon is emeritus professor of economics at the Paris School of Economics. He has been the director of the Paris School from 2007 to 2013. Before that he was the chief economist and senior vice-president of the World Bank in Washington. He spent the rest of his career as a professor at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris. He is a specialist in public economic policy, inequality, and economic development and has authored a large number of academic papers and books. He is also active in the international development community, lecturing and advising leading international agencies as well as foreign governments.
Francisco H. G. Ferreira

World Bank
Francisco H. G. Ferreira is a Senior Adviser in the World Bank’s Development Research Group, where he oversees the Bank’s research programs on poverty, inequality and agriculture. He was formerly the Bank’s Chief Economist for the Africa Region, and has also served as Deputy Chief Economist for Latin America and the Caribbean, and as co-Director of the World Development Report 2006, on Equity and Development. Francisco is also a non-resident Research Fellow at the Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA, Bonn), and has published widely in the fields of poverty and inequality in developing countries. He was awarded the Haralambos Simeonides and the Adriano Romariz Duarte Prizes by the Brazilian Economic and Econometric Societies respectively, and the Kendricks Prize by the International Association for Research in Income and Wealth. Francisco serves on the editorial boards of the Journal of Economic Inequality (where he was previously Editor in Chief), the Review of Income and Wealth, and the World Bank Economic Review. Francisco has taught at the Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro and at the Paris School of Economics. He was born and raised in São Paulo, Brazil, and holds a Ph.D. in Economics from the London School of Economics.
Ravi Kanbur

Cornell University
Ravi Kanbur is T. H. Lee Professor of World Affairs, International Professor of Applied Economics and Management, and Professor of Economics at Cornell University. He holds an appointment tenured both in the Charles H. Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, and in the Department of Economics in the College of Arts and Sciences. Prof. Kanbur's main areas of interest are public economics and development economics. His work spans conceptual, empirical, and policy analysis. He is particularly interested in bridging the worlds of rigorous analysis and practical policy making. His vita lists over 250 publications, covering topics such as risk taking, inequality, poverty, structural adjustment, labor, urbanization and agriculture. The honors he has received include the Quality of Research Discovery Award of the American Agricultural Economics Association and an Honorary Professorship at the University of Warwick. He is the current President of the Society for the Study of Economic Inequality, President-elect of the Human Development and Capability Association (HDCA), and a member of the OECD High Level Expert Group on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress.
Peter Lanjouw

University of Amsterdam
Peter Lanjouw is professor of Development Economics at VU University, Amsterdam, since January, 2015. Prior to his appointment to the VU he was Research Manager of the Poverty Team in the Development Economics Research Group of the World Bank. He joined the World Bank in 1992, after completing his doctoral studies in economics from the London School of Economics. Prof. Lanjouw’s research focuses on the analysis of poverty and inequality as well as on rural development, notably the study of a village economy in rural India and the broader analysis of rural non-farm diversification. He has taught at UC Berkeley, University of Namur, the Foundation for the Advanced Study of International Development in Tokyo, and he is also an Honorary Fellow of the Amsterdam Institute of International Development, Amsterdam. Prof. Lanjouw has published in such leading economics journals as Econometrica, the Economic Journal and the Journal of Public Economics as well as numerous field journals such as Journal of Development Economics, The World Bank Economic Review, World Development, Agricultural Economics and the Journal of Economic Inequality. He is currently editor of the World Bank Research Observer.
Nora Lustig

Tulane University
Nora Lustig is Samuel Z. Stone Professor of Latin American Economics and Director of the Commitment to Equity Institute (CEQI) at Tulane University. She is also a Nonresident Fellow at the Center for Global Development and the Inter-American Dialogue. Her current research focuses on assessing the impact of taxation and social spending on inequality and poverty in developing countries and on the determinants of income distribution in Latin America. Prof. Lustig is a founding member and past president of the Latin American and Caribbean Economic Association (LACEA) and was a co-director of the World Bank’s World Development Report 2000/1, Attacking Poverty. She is the editor of the Journal of Economic Inequality‘s Forum and Vice-Chair of the Board of Directors of the Global Development Network (GDN). In 2014, Prof. Lustig joined the Stiglitz et al. Commission on Measuring Economic Performance and Social Progress. She received her doctorate in Economics from the University of California, Berkeley.
Eric Marlier

Luxembourg Institute of Socio Economic Research
Eric Marlier is the International Scientific Coordinator of the Luxembourg Institute of Socio-Economic Research (LISER), which he joined in 2002. Since 1988, he has been in charge of many international dossiers - for the European Commission, the United Nations (UNDESA, UNDP, UNESCO, UNICEF), the OECD, the World Bank, the Council of Europe, various national Governments and the research community within and outside the European Union. He is very much involved in international comparative research (EU and beyond). He has been managing the “European Network of independent experts on social inclusion” (2005-2014) and then the “European Social Policy Network” (since 2014), with teams of experts in 35 European countries. He is also coordinating the European “Network for the analysis of EU-SILC” (Net-SILC) since 2008. He has written widely on the development of social indicators and their use in the policy process (at national, EU and global levels), on international social monitoring, and on comparative socio-economic analysis (esp. on income, poverty, inequality and living conditions). He is inter alia the author of “Social Indicators: The EU and Social Inclusion” (OUP, 2002) and “The EU and Social Inclusion: Facing the Challenges” (The Policy Press, 2007), both with Tony Atkinson, Bea Cantillon and Brian Nolan. He is regularly called on as an international advisor in social policy and in the implementation of comparative social surveys. He is a member of various European Task-Forces and Working Groups covering international social monitoring and social statistics issues.

Robert Allen

New York University, Abu Dhabi
Bob Allen is Global Distinguished Professor of Economic History at New York University, Abu Dhabi, and a Senior Research Fellow, Nuffield College, Oxford. He has written extensively on English agricultural history. He has also studied international competition in the steel industry, the extinction of whales, and contemporary policies on education. His articles have won the Cole Prize, the Redlich Prize, and the Explorations Prize. His books include Enclosure and the Yeoman: The Agricultural Development of the South Midlands, 1450-1850, and Farm to Factory: A Re-interpretation of the Soviet Industrial Revolution, both of which won the Ranki Prize of the Economic History Association. Currently, he is studying the global history of wages and prices, pre-industrial living standards around the world, the economic history of the Middle East, and the causes of global inequality. Professor Allen is a Fellow of the British Academy and the Royal Society of Canada.
Sabina Alkire

Oxford University and George Washington University
Sabina Alkire directs the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHI), a research centre within the Department of International Development, University of Oxford. She is also the Oliver T. Carr Professor and Professor of Economics and International Affairs at George Washington University (part time until 2016). She also continues as research collaborator of the Harvard Global Equity Initiative at Harvard University. Her research interests and publications include multidimensional poverty measurement and analysis, welfare economics, the capability approach, the measurement of freedoms and human development. She holds a DPhil in Economics from the University of Oxford.
Haroon Bhorat

University of Cape Town
Haroon Bhorat is Professor of Economics and Director of the Development Policy Research Unit (DPRU) at the University of Cape Town, South Africa. Prof. Bhorat’s research interests cover labour economics, poverty and income distribution. He has co-authored three books on labour market and poverty issues in South Africa, and has published more than 150 academic journal articles, book chapters and working papers. Professor Bhorat graduated with a PhD in Economics at Stellenbosch University in South Africa. He studied at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and was a Cornell University research fellow. Prof. Bhorat was a member of the UN Commission on Legal Empowerment of the Poor (LEP), and Head of Research for the UN’s High-Level Panel on the Post-2015 Development Agenda. He is a non-Resident Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution and a Research Fellow at the Institute of Labor, Bonn. Prof. Bhorat has served on a number of government research advisory panels, and was an economic advisor to the former Minister of Finance, and former Presidents Thabo Mbeki and Kgalema Motlanthe, serving on the Presidential Economic Advisory Panel.
Laurence Chandy

Brookings Institution
Laurence Chandy is a fellow in the Global Economy and Development Program and the Development Assistance and Governance Initiative. His research focuses on global poverty, fragile states and aid effectiveness. Laurence has worked in a number of developing countries as a consultant and advisor, supporting governments in Africa, the Caribbean and the Pacific on a variety of economic and institutional reforms. He previously worked as a speechwriter for former President of the World Bank, James Wolfensohn. Laurence’s most recent book is The Last Mile in Ending Extreme Poverty (Brookings Press, 2015). He graduated from Magdalen College, Oxford, with a MA in Philosophy, Politics and Economics and MSc in Development Economics.
Shaohua Chen

World Bank
Shaohua Chen is a Lead statistician in the Development Economics Research Group of the World Bank. Her main research interests over the last 20 years have focused on poverty and inequality measurement. She has managed the Global Poverty monitoring and online computational system PovcalNet at the World Bank since 1991. She is also responsible for the measurement and projection of global poverty for the World Bank’s major reports such as World Development Indicators and Global Monitoring report. Before joining the World Bank, Shaohua was a lecturer at the Huazhong University of Science and Technology. Her research findings have been published in major Economics and Statistics journals, including Quarterly Journal of Economics; Review of Economic and Statistics; Journal of Development Economics; and Journal of Public Economics, etc. She received her MSc in Statistical Computing from American University.
Angus Deaton

Princeton University
Angus Deaton is the Dwight D. Eisenhower Professor of Economics and International Affairs at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs and the Economics Department at Princeton University. Prof. Deaton’s main current research areas are in health, wellbeing, and economic development. He is a corresponding Fellow of the British Academy, a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and of the Econometric Society and, in 1978, was the first recipient of the Society's Frisch Medal. He was President of the American Economic Association in 2009. In 2012 he was awarded the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award. He was elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences on April 28, 2015. Prof. Deaton’s current research focuses on the determinants of health in rich and poor countries, on the measurement and interpretation of self-reported wellbeing, as well as on the measurement of poverty in India and around the world. His most recent book is The Great Escape: health, wealth, and the origins of inequality.
Stefan Dercon

Oxford University and DFID, UK
Stefan Dercon is a development economist applying microeconomics and statistics to problems of development. His interests are diverse, including research on risk and poverty, the foundations of growth in poor societies, agriculture and rural institutions, migration, political economy, childhood poverty, social and geographic mobility, micro-insurance, and measurement issues related to poverty and vulnerability. Stefan Dercon is Professor of Development Economics at the University of Oxford. Prof. Dercon is currently on leave, working as Chief Economist at the Department for International Development (DFID). In October 2015, he will become director of the Centre for the Study of African Economies at Oxford. Prof. Dercon has worked extensively in Ethiopia, Tanzania and India, and across Africa, specializing in the collection and analysis of longitudinal surveys on children and adults.
James Foster

George Washington University
James E. Foster is Professor of Economics and International Affairs at The George Washington University. He received his Ph.D. in economics from Cornell University, holds a Doctorate Honoris Causa, from Universidad Autónoma del Estado de Hidalgo (Mexico), and is an Honorary Member of the SCR, Magdalen College, Oxford. Professor Foster's research focuses on welfare economics — using economic tools to evaluate and enhance the wellbeing of people. His joint 1984 Econometrica paper is one of the most cited papers on poverty; it introduced the FGT Index, which has been used in thousands of studies and was the basis for targeting the Progresa/Oportunidades program in México. Other research includes work on economic inequality with Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen; on poverty and inclusive growth with Miguel Szekely, Former Undersecretary of Education in México; on multidimensional poverty with Sabina Alkire, Director of Oxford's Poverty and Human Development Initiative; and on literacy with Kaushik Basu, Chief Economist of the World Bank.
Ana Maria Ibanez

Universidad de los Andes, Colombia
Ana Maria Ibanez is professor at the Universidad de los Andes. Her research concentrates of the microeconomic analysis of conflict. In particular, she studies the consequences of armed conflict on households and victims of conflict. Her awards include the Japanese Award for Outstanding Research on Development, Global Development Network, 2005; honorary mention in social sciences, Fundación Alejandro Ángel Escobar, 2009; and Juan Luis Londoño award, 2010.
Zhu Ling

Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Beijing
Zhu Ling is a Member of the Academy and Professorial Research Fellow, Institute of Economics, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. Zhu has a PhD in Agro-economics from the University of Hohenheim, Stuttgart, Germany and a Master of Arts in Economics from Wuhan University, Wuhan, China. Her research interest includes agricultural economics, rural development, and development economics. She has written books on Rural Reform and Peasant Income in China, Public Works and Poverty Alleviation in Rural China (with co-author Jian Zhongyi), Credit for Rural Poor in China (with co-authors Jiang Zhongyi and Joachim von Braum), Economic Transition and Social Development (with co-author Mao Tianqi and others), and How to Get Out of the Poverty Trap: Case Studies from the Tibetan Plateau in Provinces of Yunnan, Qinghai and Gansu (with co-authors Wang Luolin and others). Among the articles and papers that she has written include How to Measure Development, Inclusive Development and Social Justice Policy Choices, Food Security and Agricultural Changes in the Course of China’s Urbanization, and Agricultural Change and Food Security in China.
Germano Mwabu

University of Nairobi
Germano Mwabu is Professor of Economics at the University of Nairobi. His research interests cover ill health as a major component of poverty, and improving the quality of healthcare for African communities. He has also written widely about health financing in low-income settings and investigated whether insurance markets could be used to finance health for all. Prof. Mwabu co-directed a project on poverty, income distribution, and labour markets in Sub-Saharan Africa under the auspices of the African Economic Research Consortium (AERC) from 1998 to 2001. He was a Senior Research Fellow at UNU/WIDER, Helsinki, where he managed a project on public goods provision. Previously, he held positions of Associate Professor of Economics and Dean of Commerce at Kenyatta University. He has served as a member of the WHO Commission on Women’s Health in Africa. Prof. Mwabu holds an MA and a doctorate in economics from Boston University. His early training was at the University of Nairobi, where he earned a Commerce degree and an MA in economics.
Martin Ravallion

Georgetown University
Martin Ravallion holds the inaugural Edmond D. Villani Chair of Economics at Georgetown University. Prior to joining Georgetown in December 2012 he was Director of the World Bank’s research department, the Development Research Group. He joined the Bank in 1988 and worked in almost all sectors and all regions over the following 24 years. He holds a Ph.D. in economics from the London School of Economics, and has taught economics at L.S.E., Oxford University, the Australian National University and Princeton University. Martin’s main research interests over the last 25 years have concerned poverty and policies for fighting it. He has advised numerous governments and international agencies on this topic, and he has written extensively on this and other subjects in economics, including four books and over 200 papers in scholarly journals and edited volumes. Martin is President-elect of the Society for the Study of Economic Inequality, a Senior Fellow of the Bureau for Research in Economic Analysis of Development, a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research and a non-resident Fellow of the Center for Global Development. Amongst various prizes and awards, in 2012 he was awarded the John Kenneth Galbraith Prize from the American Agricultural and Applied Economics Association.
Ana Revenga

World Bank
Ana Revenga is the Senior Director of the Poverty Global Practice at the World Bank Group. In her World Bank career, Ana has worked in the East Asia and the Pacific, Europe and Central Asia, Latin America, and Middle East and North Africa regions, as well as in OECD countries.Until July 1, 2014, she was Director of Human Development in the Europe and Central Asia Region and Acting Vice President for the Poverty Reduction and Economic Management Network at the World Bank. Prior to joining the World Bank, Ana worked in the Central Bank of Spain and taught labor and international economics at the Centro de Estudios Monetarios and Financieros. She has published extensively on education and employment, equity, food security, social protection, poverty, and trade issues, and has worked across a broad spectrum of low, middle and high income countries in Asia, Europe, Latin America, and North America. Ana has a PhD in Economics from Harvard University and a degree in Human Rights from the Law Faculty at the University of Geneva.
Peter Saunders

University of New South Wales
Peter Saunders was Director of the Social Policy Research Centre at Australia’s University of New South Wales (UNSW) from February 1987 until July 2007, and now holds a Research Chair in Social Policy within the Centre. His research interests include poverty and income distribution, household needs and living standards, social security reform, social exclusion, comparative social policy and ageing and social protection in China. Prof. Saunders’ recent books include: Down and Out: Poverty and Exclusion in Australia (Policy Press, 2011), The Ends and Means of Welfare, Coping with Economic and Social Change in Australia (Cambridge University Press, 2002), The Poverty Wars, Reconnecting Research with Reality and (with James Walter) Ideas and Influence, Social Science and Public Policy in Australia (both published by UNSW Press in 2005). Prof. Saunders was elected a Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia in 1995, and has worked as a consultant for a range of national and international organizations, including the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, the OECD, the IMF, the Asian Development Bank, the International Social Security Association, and the Royal Commission on Social Policy in New Zealand. He was elected the first President of the Australian Social Policy Association in 2009 and has been President of the Foundation for International Studies on Social Security (FISS) since 2009.
Amartya Sen

Harvard University
Amartya Sen is Thomas W. Lamont University Professor, and Professor of Economics and Philosophy, at Harvard University and was until 2004 the Master of Trinity College, Cambridge. He is also Senior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows. He has served as President of the Econometric Society, the American Economic Association, the Indian Economic Association, and the International Economic Association. Amartya Sen’s research has ranged over social choice theory, economic theory, ethics and political philosophy, welfare economics, theory of measurement, decision theory, development economics, public health, and gender studies. Amartya Sen’s books have been translated into more than thirty languages, and include Growth Economics (1970), Collective Choice and Social Welfare (1970), The Standard of Living (1987), Development as Freedom (1999), Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny (2006), and (jointly with Jean Dreze) An Uncertain Glory: India and Its Contradictions (2013). Amartya Sen’s awards include Bharat Ratna (India); Commandeur de la Legion d'Honneur (France); the National Humanities Medal (USA); Ordem do Merito Cientifico (Brazil); Honorary Companion of Honour (UK); Aztec Eagle (Mexico); Edinburgh Medal (UK); the George Marshall Award (USA); the Eisenhauer Medal (USA); and the Nobel Prize in Economics.
S. Subramanian

Indian Council of Social Research Fellow
S. Subramanian is an Indian Council of Social Science Research (ICSSR) National Fellow and a former professor of the Madras Institute of Development Studies. Subramanian is an elected fellow of the Human Development and Capability Association (HDCA). He has worked extensively on measurement and other aspects of poverty, inequality, and demography, and on topics in collective choice theory, welfare economics, and development economics. His work has been published in journals such as Journal of Development Economics, Economics and Philosophy, Social Choice and Welfare, and Theory and Decision. He is the author of The Poverty Line (Oxford India Short Introductions series, 2012). An established scholar in poverty and inequality, he has been the recipient (along with his co-author) of the 2001 Dudley Seers Memorial Prize awarded to the best article published in the Journal of Development Studies.