Connecting the Poor to Economic Growth: Eight Key Questions

Publication Date: April 2005

Publisher: Center for Global Development; Center for Global Development

Author(s): Sarah Lucas; Peter Timmer; Sarah Lucas; Peter Timmer

Research Area: Economics

Type:

Abstract:

It has long been understood that economic growth is the essential foundation for poverty reduction. The key to income growth is the expansion of jobs that pay sustainable remunerative wages, and the two keys areas of production in this vein have almost always been agriculture and labor-intensive manufactured exports. Rising average incomes, both personal and national, are a necessary ingredient for improved livelihoods, but they do not guarantee broad-based poverty reduction. Economic history shows that countries, and communities within countries, with similar growth rates can have very different degrees of success in connecting growth to the poor and translating it into sustained poverty reduction.