Concepts And Operationalization Of Pro-poor Growth

Growth that reduces poverty is often considered pro-poor regardless of whether the poor benefit from it more than the non-poor. Such growth could simply be termed poverty-reducing growth. This paper argues that for growth to be pro-poor it should disproportionally benefit the poor. The paper 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. A new index is proposed based exclusively on the redistributional component of poverty-gap changes obtained through an exact decomposition.