Testing For Pro-Poorness Of Growth, With An Application To Mexico

This paper proposes techniques to test for whether growth has been pro-poor. The authors first review different definitions of pro-poorness and argue for the use of methods that can generate results that are robust over classes of pro-poor measures and ranges of poverty lines. They then provide statistical procedures that rely on the use of sample data to infer whether growth has been pro-poor in a population. They apply these procedures to Mexican household surveys for the years of 1992, 1998 and 2004.