The importance of broad based growth for development and poverty reduction is not a new concept. The need for labor intensive growth, coupled with investments in agriculture and human development assets was a core theme of the 1990 World Development Report on Poverty. It was also a key lesson emerging from the rapid growth and poverty reduction that East Asia experienced in the 1980s and 1990s as presented in "The East Asian Miracle." Finally, it was also underscored in the 2000/01 World Development Report, which placed more emphasis on expanding opportunities for the poor. In the late 1990s, the term pro-poor growth became popular as economists started to take a new look at how growth and changes in inequality together affect poverty reduction, often using the newly available cross country household datasets to support their analysis. This work has allowed a better understanding of how to measure the distributional impact of growth. It also sparked a lively debate on the relative importance of growth and inequality for poverty reduction raising such questions as: whether or not poverty reduction strategies should focus on growth and simultaneously empowering the poor to benefit from growth or on promoting redistribution and reducing inequality? In addition, questions arose as to whether increasing the emphasis on distribution in growth policies involved a trade-off leading to lower overall growth rates. While pro-poor growth is an attractive concept, policy makers and researchers alike know relatively little about policy packages to accelerate the pace of poverty reduction through economic growth and the role of country conditions in affecting distributional pattern of growth. This is the main goal of the Operationalizing Pro-Poor Growth work program that the World Bank is currently undertaking. Moreover, this website provides an introduction on how growth and changes in inequality together affect poverty reduction, as well as some of the necessary tools to better analyze the link between growth, inequality and poverty reduction. It is divided into seven sections: A summary of recent literature on the relationship between povery, growth and inequality can be found under the section Poverty, Growth, and Inequality to shed some light on the pro-growth/pro-distribution debate. Pro-Poor Growth provides methodological guidance for measuring pro-poor growth. It presents two definitions used in the pro-poor growth literature and outlines different methodological tools available to measure the "pro-poorness" of growth using each definition. The Operationalizing Pro-Poor Growth section aims to help development practitioners to better analyze the linkages between the growth process and poor households and how they are affected by policies and country conditions. Data and Tools informs on recent trends in povery indicators and links to sources of data on poverty. Training and Events presents the materials from recent and upcoming events related to pro-poor growth.
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