Author Description

Shows that growth that reduces poverty is often considered pro-poor regardless of whether the poor benefit from it more than the non-poor. Argues that for growth to be pro-poor it should disproportionally benefit the poor. Proposes an operational definition of pro-poor growth that restricts it to the cases in which the mean income of the poor increases proportionally more than that of the non-poor, and proposes a new index based exclusively on the redistributional component of poverty-gap changes obtained through an exact decomposition. Finally, presents several indicators for evaluating and monitoring the 'pro-poorness' of growth over time and concludes with an empirical illustration for the case of Honduras using data for selected years between 1992 and 2007.