Introduction and Key Messages

In many ways, the last ten years have been rather good for developing countries. Average income growth rates have been quite high — in fact, substantially higher than in industrialized countries — and absolute income poverty has come down substantially (Chen and Ravallion, 2010). While much of this success in reducing poverty is related to particularly high growth rates in some populous Asian economies (including China, India, Indonesia, and Vietnam), substantial rates of per capita growth and associated poverty reduction has been experienced in the majority of countries from all regions. Even in Sub-Saharan Africa, growth has been higher than in rich countries, and poverty rates have started to come down, albeit only slowly and from a very high level (Bourguignon et al., 2008).