Abstract for “Distributional Change, Pro-poor Growth and Convergence: An Application to Non- income Dimensions”

There are broadly two approaches to define growth as pro-poor: the weak approach considers whether growth led to a decline in poverty and the strong approach considers whether growth led to distributional changes in favor of the poor (Ravallion 2004). The strong approach is classified into relative and absolute notions. The former defines growth as pro-poor when incomes of the poor grow proportionally more than incomes of the non-poor. The latter defines growth as pro-poor when growth leads to a reduction in the absolute differences in incomes of the poor and the non-poor. This analysis has been extended to the case of non-anonymous growth (Grimm, 2006) and to the case of non-income growth (Grosse et al., 2008). In this paper we propose an alternative graphical approach to the analysis of pro-poor growth and suggest new measures of pro-poor growth. We focus our attention on non-income dimensions of welfare and show that our approach, which can be anonymous as well as non-anonymous, allows us not only to derive indices of the inequality of growth rates and of pro-poorness, but also to check whether the growth process led to beta/sigma convergence. The Gini index of relative inequality can be expressed as a vector product of population shares and corresponding income shares by using a G-matrix (Silber, 1989). Using the G-matrix formulation