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Poverty and inequality remain at the top of the global economic agenda, and the methodology of measuring poverty continues to be a key area of research. This new book, from a leading international group of scholars, offers an up to date and innovative survey of new methods for estimating poverty at the local level, as well as the most recent multidimensional methods of the dynamics of poverty.

Poverty reduction strategy papers (PRSPs) present a recipient country's program of intent for the utilization of World Bank loans and grants to alleviate debt under the bank's programs of action for poverty reduction in highly indebted poor countries (HIPCs). This article argues that structural transformation is a prerequisite for poverty reduction in Zambia. However, the Zambian PRSP is largely informed by mainstream thinking on poverty and livelihoods. It champions a neoliberal program constructed on the sanctity of the market and seeks to maintain the very structural processes that engender poverty. Because it fails to break, conceptually and methodologically, from past program failures, the PRSP is likely to be just the latest installment in the ever-changing fashionable semantics of the "development community." The article examines the conceptual and methodological failures of the Zambian PRSP particularly with respect to the measurement of poverty and the concept of participation.

Two questions basic to welfare policy are examined: (1) whether the amount of poverty-related transfers is sufficient to fill the poverty gap; & (2) which families actually get benefits & how much of their income deficit is filled by those benefits. Transfers are seen to be sufficient. The post-Social Security poverty gap is $74 billion, while poverty-related programs total $198 billion. Further, 86% of current income-conditioned benefits go to the pretransfer poor & 89% of those are used to alleviate poverty (fill the poverty gap). Thus, if a substantial fraction of total federal & state expenditures on poverty-related programs could be targeted more toward the poor, the poverty gap would be eliminated. The current programs, however, would have to be changed substantially to achieve the necessary retargeting. 3 Tables, 1 Appendix. HA

In this paper we use unique longitudinal data sources to study the relationship between poverty and fertility at household level in Albania, Ethiopia, Indonesia and Vietnam. These countries differ greatly in their history, average income, social structure, economic institutions and demographic features. We find that there is a substantial difference in the relative importance of the determinants of poverty dynamics and fertility; the persistence of high levels of fertility and poverty in Ethiopia is driven by lack of economic growth, high demand of children and poor access to family planning; education is a crucial element in reducing poverty and fertility, as is clear from Vietnam, Indonesia and Albania.

DAD is designed to facilitate the analysis and the comparisons of social welfare, inequality, poverty and equity across distributions of living standards and using disaggregated data. It is made available at no charge. DAD's features include the estimation of a large number of indices and curves that are useful for distributive comparisons as well as the provision of various statistical tools. It is currently the only software that systematically takes into account the sampling design of commonly used surveys in calculating asymptotic, bootstrap and p-bootstrap statistics for carrying out statistical inference. Many of DAD's features are useful for estimating the impact of programs (and reforms to these programs) on poverty and equity. ; This work was carried out with support from CRSH, FQRSC and the Poverty and Economic Policy Research Network, which is financed by the Government of Canada through the International Development Research Centre and the Canadian International Development Agency and by the Australian Agency for International Development ; Peer reviewed