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This book contributes to the debate about the role of agriculture in poverty reduction by addressing three sets of questions:Does investing in agriculture enhance/harm overall economic growth, and if so, under what conditions? Do poor people tend to participate more/less in growth in agriculture than in growth in other sectors, and if so, when? If a focus on agriculture would tend to yield larger participation by the poor, but slower overall growth, which strategy would tend to have the largest payoff in terms of poverty reduction, and under which conditions?.

This book contributes to the debate about the role of agriculture in poverty reduction by addressing three sets of questions: Does investing in agriculture enhance/harm overall economic growth, and if so, under what conditions? Do poor people tend to participate more/less in growth in agriculture than in growth in other sectors, and if so, when? If a focus on agriculture would tend to yield larger participation by the poor, but slower overall growth, which strategy would tend to have the largest payoff in terms of poverty reduction, and under which conditions?

Education and health care are basic services essential in any effort to combat poverty and are often subsidized with public funds to help achieve that purpose. This paper examines the effectiveness of public social spending on education and health care in several African countries and finds that these programs favor not the poor, but those who are better-off. It concludes that this targeting problem cannot be solved simply by adjusting the subsidy program. The constraints that prevent the poor from taking advantage of these services must also be addressed if the public subsidies are to be effective.

This article reviews trends in poverty, economic policies, and growth in a sample of African countries during the 1990s, drawing on the better household data now available. Experiences have varied. Some countries have seen sharp drops in income poverty, whereas others have witnessed marked increases. In some countries overall economic growth has been pro-poor and in others not. But the aggregate numbers hide systematic distributional effects. Taking both macro and micro perspectives of growth and poverty in Africa, the article draws four key conclusions. First, economic policy reforms (improving macroeconomic balances and liberalizing markets) appear conducive to reducing poverty. Second, market connectedness is crucial to enable participation in the gains from economic growth. Some regions and households by virtue of their remoteness were left behind when growth picked up. Third, education and access to land emerge as key private endowments to help households benefit from new economic opportunities. Finally, rainfall variations and ill health have profound effects on poverty outcomes, underscoring the significance of social risk management in poverty reduction strategies in Africa.

The view that macroeconomic adjustment disproportionately hurts the poor in Africa has become commonplace. The popular media and the nongovernmental aid community frequently express this view in critiques of Bankfunded economic reform programs. Yet the evidence on which the claim has been based is flimsy and anecdotal. The emergence of more convincing data, from detailed household surveys in Africa, provides an opportunity to set the record straight. The evidence from six African countries reviewed in this article demonstrates that poverty was more likely to decline in those that improved their macroeconomic balances than in those that did not. The critical factor is economic growth: the economy grew more rapidly and poverty declined faster in countries that improved macroeconomic balances, depreciating the real effective exchange rate. Changes in the real exchange rate also immediately and favorably affected rural incomes, benefiting the poor both directly and indirectly. But the findings also highlighted three causes for policy concern. First, many African governments have yet to display a real commitment to macroeconomic reform; second, the poorest of the poor have not benefited from recent growth in some countries; and, third, the prospects for the poor are not rosy unless there is more investment in human capital and better targeting of social spending.

Benefit incidence analysis is an extremely popular tool to assess the distribution of benefits from government expenditure in developing countries, particularly in the social sectors. The analysis describes the welfare impact of public spending on groups of people or households, typically along the income distribution. While benefit incidence analysis has generated useful insights into the distribution of benefits from public spending in a variety of sectors, many studies fail to take into account differences in needs for public services across population groups. This can lead to an inappropriate and potentially misleading assessment of equity in public spending. This article reviews the evidence and introduces techniques to account better for heterogeneous needs in benefit incidence analysis. Using the example of an empirical benefit incidence study of education expenditure in Kenya, we show that our understanding of the distributional implications of public spending is greatly improved if we account for demographic differences between population groups.

The sampling aspects of a household data set are important to analysts. The early years of the Côte d'Ivoire Living Standards Survey (CILSS) had a sampling bias, which seriously affected estimates of population statistics such as household size. The bias arose from sampling procedures that overrepresented larger dwellings. Assuming that samples drawn in later years were unbiased, a correction procedure is applied that uses weights based on household size. Results from the weighted data are then compared with the unweighted findings to assess the seriousness of the bias. Estimates of household expenditure per capita in the early years of the survey are found to be significantly underestimated, resulting in an overestimation of poverty. The sampling bias also resulted in an underestimation of the upward trend in poverty during 1985–88. The CILSS has been a popular and fruitful data set for policy analysis. These findings, however, cast doubt on the robustness of earlier work. Thus, the effort to trace sampling information is particularly worthwhile for policy-oriented applied research.

This book contributes to the debate about the role of agriculture in poverty reduction by addressing three sets of questions: Does investing in agriculture enhance/harm overall economic growth, and if so, under what conditions? Do poor people tend to participate more/less in growth in agriculture than in growth in other sectors, and if so, when? If a focus on agriculture would tend to yield larger participation by the poor, but slower overall growth, which strategy would tend to have the largest payoff in terms of poverty reduction, and under which conditions?