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Regardless of the poverty line used, the speed and scale of China's poverty reduction are historically unprecedented. Over the past 40 years, the number of people in China with incomes below US$1.90 per day—the international poverty line as defined by the World Bank to track global extreme poverty—has fallen by close to 800 million, accounting for almost three-quarters of the global reduction in extreme poverty. In 2021, China declared that it had eradicated extreme poverty according to its national poverty threshold, and that it had built a “moderately prosperous society in all respects.” However, a significant number of people remain vulnerable, with incomes below a threshold more typically used to define poverty in upper-middle-income countries. China has set a new goal of approaching common prosperity by 2035, which can help keep the policy focus on the vulnerable population. Four Decades of Poverty Reduction in China: Drivers, Insights for the World, and the Way Ahead explores the key drivers of China's poverty alleviation achievements and considers the lessons of China's experience for other developing countries. The report also makes suggestions for China's future policies. China's approach to poverty reduction was based on two pillars. The first aimed for broad-based economic transformation to open new economic opportunities and raise average incomes. The second was the recognition that targeted support was needed to alleviate persistent poverty; this support was initially provided to disadvantaged areas and later to individual households. The success of China's economic development and the associated reduction of poverty also benefited from effective governance, which helped coordinate multiple government agencies and induce cooperation from nongovernment stakeholders. To illustrate the role of broad-based economic transformation for poverty alleviation, separate sections of the report analyze growing agricultural productivity, incremental industrialization, managed urbanization and rural-to-urban migration, and the role of infrastructure

This book is a compilation of works by experts in food and nutrition security, following their participation to a workshop on \"Local level food and nutrition security and the role of subsistence/smallholder farms\", held in Seville on 9–10 September 2015, as part of the Expo Milan 2015 under the theme \"Feeding the planet, energy for life\". It discusses the current role of smallholders in connection with food security and poverty reduction in developing countries. It addresses their opportunities and constraints, by analysing the availability, access to and utilisation of production factors. Due to the relevance of smallholder farms, enhancing their production capacities and their economic and social resilience could produce positive impacts on food security and nutrition at a number of levels.

With the promotion of sustainable development and the improvement of people's awareness of ecological environment protection, the focus of contemporary regional economic development has gradually changed to how to develop industries with local characteristics and optimize the construction of a regional industrial ecosystem on the premise of considering environmental protection. Based on the cumulative prospect theory, this research studies the synergistic effect of industrial development and environmental protection in the field of poverty alleviation. The initial state of the industrial revolution, the excess return, the cost, the tax policy, the reference point, and the uncertainty of revenue all affect the evolution of the industry. The results of this research provide a theoretical basis for local governments to formulate reasonable industrial policies and to promote the development of the regional economy.

We develop a theoretical framework to study the psychology of poverty and 'aspirations failure', defined as the failure to aspire to one's own potential. In our framework, rich and the poor persons share the same preferences and same behavioural bias in setting aspirations. We show that poverty can exacerbate the effects of this behavioural bias leading to aspirations failure and hence, a behavioural poverty trap. Aspirations failure is a consequence of poverty, rather than a cause. We specify the conditions under which raising aspirations alone is sufficient to help escape from a poverty trap, even without relaxing material constraints.

This study examines whether the chief executive officer’s (CEO’s) poverty experience has an impact on firms’ corporate social responsibility (CSR). We find that firms’ CSR performance increases with CEOs’ poverty experience; specifically, firms with CEOs who experienced early-life poverty are associated with more socially responsible activities and fewer socially irresponsible activities, such as on-the-job consumption, and are more associated with key stakeholder-related rather than community-related CSR. We further find that the positive relationship between the CEO’s poverty experience and CSR strengthens for well-educated or powerful CEOs. Our evidence is consistent with our conjecture that CEOs who experienced early-life poverty have stronger compassion and prosocial psychology. Consequently, these CEOs are more willing to make long-term investments in socially beneficial activities, leading to better CSR performance, which further confirms the altruistic motivation of CSR.

Over the past 40 years, the number of people in China with incomes below US$ 1.90 per day - the International Poverty Line defined by the World Bank to track global extreme poverty- has fallen by close to 800 million. With this, China has contributed to almost three-quarters of the global reduction in the number of people living in extreme poverty. In 2021, China declared that it has eradicated extreme poverty according to the national poverty threshold, and that it has built a 'moderately prosperous society in all respects.' Whether measured with international or national poverty line, the speed and scale of China's poverty reduction is historically unprecedented. At the same time, a significant number of people remain vulnerable with incomes below a threshold more typically used to define poverty in upper-middle income countries. China has set a new goal of achieving significant progress towards common prosperity by 2035, which can help keep the policy focus on the vulnerable population over the coming decade. This report aims to explore the key drivers for China's achievements in poverty alleviation over the past 40 year and to consider the lessons of China's experience for other developing countries. The report also puts forward suggestions for China's future policies. China's approach to poverty reduction was based on two pillars. The first aimed for broad-based economic transformation to open new economic opportunities and raise average incomes. The second was the recognition that targeted support was nonetheless needed to alleviate persistent poverty; support initially was provided to disadvantaged areas and later to individual households. The success of China's economic development and the associated reduction of poverty benefited from effective governance, which helped coordinate multiple government agencies and induce cooperation from non-government stakeholders. To illustrate the role of broad-based economic transformation for poverty alleviation, separate sections of the report analyze growing agricultural productivity; incremental industrialization; managed urbanization and rural-to-urban migration; and the role of infrastructure. The evolution of China's approach to poverty alleviation, from placed-based to country-wide social protection policies, and the targeted poverty alleviation strategy under implementation since 2012 are also reviewed--

We study the impact of post-1990 school finance reforms, during the so-called “adequacy” era, on absolute and relative spending and achievement in low-income school districts. Using an event study research design that exploits the apparent randomness of reform timing, we show that reforms lead to sharp, immediate, and sustained increases in spending in low-income school districts. Using representative samples from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, we find that reforms cause increases in the achievement of students in these districts, phasing in gradually over the years following the reform. The implied effect of school resources on educational achievement is large.

How large economic stimuli generate individual and aggregate responses is a central question in economics, but has not been studied experimentally. We provided one-time cash transfers of about USD 1000 to over 10,500 poor households across 653 randomized villages in rural Kenya. The implied fiscal shock was over 15 percent of local GDP. We find large impacts on consumption and assets for recipients. Importantly, we document large positive spillovers on non-recipient households and firms, and minimal price inflation. We estimate a local transfer multiplier of 2.5. We interpret welfare implications through the lens of a simple household optimization framework.

We study how women’s choices over labor activities in village economies correlate with poverty and whether enabling the poorest women to take on the activities of their richer counterparts can set them on a sustainable trajectory out of poverty. To do this we conduct a large-scale randomized control trial, covering over 21,000 households in 1,309 villages surveyed four times over a seven-year period, to evaluate a nationwide program in Bangladesh that transfers livestock assets and skills to the poorest women. At baseline, the poorest women mostly engage in low return and seasonal casual wage labor while wealthier women solely engage in livestock rearing. The program enables poor women to start engaging in livestock rearing, increasing their aggregate labor supply and earnings. This leads to asset accumulation (livestock, land, and business assets) and poverty reduction, both sustained after four and seven years. These gains do not crowd out the livestock businesses of noneligible households while the wages these receive for casual jobs increase as the poor reduce their labor supply. Our results show that (i) the poor are able to take on the work activities of the nonpoor but face barriers to doing so, and, (ii) one-off interventions that remove these barriers lead to sustainable poverty reduction.

Inclusive businesses that combine profit making with social impact are claimed to hold the potential for poverty alleviation while also creating new entrepreneurial and innovation opportunities. Current research, however, offers little insight on the processes through which for-profit business organizations introduce social innovations that can profitably create social impact. To understand how social innovations emerge and become sustained in business organizations, we studied a telecom firm in Kenya that successfully extended financial services across the country through a number of mobile banking innovations. Our qualitative analysis revealed the strong role of being embedded in local networks and structures for initiating and implementing social innovations. Strong embeddedness enhanced the pragmatic and ethical imperative for internalizing social issues, but also provided access to diverse resources for implementing and legitimizing social innovations. However, hybridization processes that emphasized social issues introduced organizational tensions by increasing goal diversity and requiring adapting organizational processes and structures. The case shows how developing a mission-driven identity enabled the sustenance of social innovations by providing a meta-narrative that bridged goal diversities and rationalized organizational change.