Papers Published in World Economics:
Measuring Global Poverty Right
The international community is committed to millennium development goals which postulate a vision of global development that makes eliminating poverty and sustaining development the overriding objective of global development efforts. In the hierarchy of the MDGs, the first and foremost goal is to reduce by half, between 1990–2015, the proportion of people whose income is less than a dollar a day (a widely used yardstick to measure extreme poverty). However, estimating such poverty across developing countries and globally is by no means a simple exercise nor has it yielded unambiguous results. This article provides a brief summary of the state of the art in global poverty estimates, including the problems as well as the possible solutions.
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Rethinking Development Effectiveness
This article reviews some recent research on aid effectiveness. An important
finding of this research is that foreign aid has been much more effective than is
generally presumed. It also suggests that the current aid allocation policy of
development agencies, based on selectivity, has a fragile empirical foundation and
discriminates against capacity-constrained/geographically disadvantaged
countries. To achieve international development objectives, the fundamental
basis for foreign aid allocation should be the Millennium Development Goals and
national poverty reduction strategies—a bottom-up approach, as contrasted from
the top-down method currently being practiced.
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