Working Paper Number 170 April 2009 What Is Poverty Reduction ?

Abstract

There is a healthy debate about how to achieve poverty reduction in developing countries, but not enough discussion of what we mean by poverty reduction. Poverty reduction is often used as a short-hand for promoting economic growth that will permanently lift as many people as possible over a poverty line. But there are many different objectives that are consistent with poverty reduction, and we have to make choices between them. There are trade-offs between tackling current and future poverty, between helping as many poor people as possible and focusing on those in chronic poverty, and between measures that tackle the causes of poverty and those which deal with the symptoms. Because donors focus on just one dimension of poverty reduction (growth) they marginalise other legitimate objectives such as reducing chronic poverty or providing social services in countries that cannot otherwise afford them.