Leaving no one behind: the impact of pro-poor growth
Across the world the gap between the rich and the poor is widening, and the current focus on relative inequality fails to address the issue.
Over the past 30 years, absolute inequality has always increased when counties have experienced prolonged periods of income growth across the population as a whole.
To address the widening gap between the rich and the poor and in order to leave no one behind, a focus on change in absolute inequality is more appropriate than the usual focus on relative inequality
This paper examines the impact of pro-poor growth policies and argues that reducing absolute inequality in the future will require the rate of growth for the bottom 40% to be more than twice the mean.
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