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While central notions around agency are well established in academic literature, progress on the empirical front has faced major challenges around developing tractable measures and data availability. This has limited our understanding about patterns of agency and empowerment of women across countries. Measuring key dimensions of women's agency and empowerment is complex, but feasible and important. This paper systematically explores what can be learned from Demographic and Health Survey (DHS) data for fifty-eight countries, representing almost 80 percent of the female population of developing countries. It is the first such empirical investigation. The findings quantify some important correlations. Completing secondary education and beyond has consistently large positive associations, underlining the importance of going beyond primary schooling. There appear to be positive links with poverty reduction and economic growth, but clearly this alone is not enough. Context specificity and multidimension...

China has achieved high economic growth for over 20 years but still has a sizeable number of people living in poverty. Using large household survey data, this paper attempts to present a comprehensive picture and identify the main determinants of poverty in both the urban and rural sectors. It concludes that despite rising urban poverty in recent years, rural poverty is still predominant in China. The slow progress in reducing poverty has been caused by rising inequality, particularly the urban–rural divide and interregional inequality. In sharp contrast to the government’s optimism in poverty reduction, this paper shows that poverty in China is still serious and has become increasingly more difficult to reduce. Although China may easily meet the international development target of reducing poverty by half from 1990 to 2015, the battle against poverty is far from over, even

During the course of the late 1980s and early 1990s, improvements in health and education and progress in poverty reduction ground to a halt, or began to be eroded, in many developing regions and in the transition economies. In 1996 the OECD Development Assistance Committee (DAC) agreed the International Development Targets (IDTs) shown in Box 11.1, reflecting the concern of development agencies and their developing country partners about these trends. This chapter considers whether these targets are attainable.

Metadata only record As part of the World Bank's poverty reduction strategy, Poverty Assessments have been carried out for a number of countries which analyse who the poor are, the causes of poverty and poverty reduction policies. This article reviews what can be learnt from the twenty-five Assessments prepared for countries in sub-Saharan Africa up to 1996. Whilst other factors are acknowledged in identifying the poor, the Assessments over-emphasize income-poverty defined against an inevitably arbitrary poverty line. The Assessments are shown to be weak in addressing the causes of poverty, often ignoring the historical perspective, political context, and international dimensions such as debt and commodity price trends, focusing instead on the lack of growth in recent years as the main cause of poverty. Weak understanding of the causes of poverty undermines the basis for country-specific poverty reduction strategies: policy recommendations are usually an uncritical presentation of the World Bank's three-pronged strategy of growth, investment in human capital and social safety nets. Although the Assessments do not explicitly acknowledge the point, they suggest that the number of poor people in Africa will continue to rise; nor is there any basis for confidence that policies are being put in place to redress the situation.

The Development Assistance Committee (DAC) of the OECD has set target rates of poverty incidence and levels of a number of human development indicators as goals to be met with the aid of development assistance by the years 2005 and 2015. In this paper we assess the likelihood that these goals will be met. We estimate future levels of poverty and human development indicators, using econometric models that capture the past relationship between per capita economic growth and both poverty and human development indicators. Our models use existing projections of future economic growth for the world's major developing regions. We find that for some developing regions achievement of the DAC poverty targets depends critically on the pattern as well as the rate of growth, as targets are only met when high or medium levels of income equality accompany growth. The prospects for achieving the human development targets, particularly gender equity ones, are good for most regions. Copyright © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.