Since 2000, Armenia's economic performance has been remarkable. Real economic growth has averaged 11 percent a year, annual inflation has averaged 3 percent, and poverty and inequality have fallen. The country has outperformed other low-income countries including other members of the Commonwealth of Independent States. This is particularly impressive given the geographical location of Armenia, the closure of two critical borders, and occasional political turmoil. The key factors behind Armenia's economic performance are prudent monetary and fiscal policies, liberal trade and foreign exchange regimes, rapid and relaively well-sequenced structural reforms, and support from the Armenian diaspora. In addition, the implementation of a poverty reduction strategy since 2002 has complemented the effect of economic growth on reducing poverty. This book assesses the country's economic transformation during the last 10 years and discusses the challenges to sustaining these successes.

This book assesses the global significance of China’s decade-long campaign to reduce poverty. After showing how the country’s unique approach to poverty alleviation brought about unparalleled progress toward achieving both the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the authors shed light on how China’s experience can help other countries around the globe as they try to permanently rid humanity of the scourge of poverty under ever more challenging social, economic and environmental conditions.

This paper discusses the progress that Vietnam has made toward meeting a core set of development goals that the government recently adopted as part of its Comprehensive Poverty Reduction and Growth Strategy (CPRGS). These goals are strongly related to the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), but are adapted and expanded to reflect Vietnam's national challenges and the government's ambitious development plans. For each Vietnam Development Goal, the authors describe recent trends in relation to the trajectories implied by the MDGs, outline the intermediate targets identified by the government, and discuss the challenges involved in meeting these. Relative to other countries of similar per capita expenditures, Vietnam has made rapid progress in a number of key areas. Poverty has halved over the 1990s, enrollment rates in primary education have risen to 91 percent (although there is a quality problem), indicators of gender equity have been strengthened, child mortality has been reduced, maternal health has improved, and real progress has been made in combating malaria and other communicable diseases. In contrast, Vietnam scores worse than other comparable countries in the areas of child malnutrition, access to clean water, and combating HIV/AIDS. A number of important crosscutting issues emerge from this analysis that need to be addressed. One such challenge is improving equity, both in terms of ensuring that the benefits of growth are distributed evenly across the population and in terms of access to public services. This will involve addressing the affordability of education and curative health care for poor households. Improvements in public expenditure planning are needed to align resources better to stated desired outcomes and to link nationally-defined targets to subnational planning and budgeting processes. There is also a need to address capacity and data gaps which will be crucial for effective monitoring. This paper--a product of the Poverty Reduction and Economic Management Sector Unit, East Asia and Pacific Region--is part of a larger effort in the region to help governments move toward outcome-based planning for poverty reduction.

Poverty Reduction and Sustainable Development in Rural China is translated from the original Chinese to provide a look into how scholars in China have been assessing perceptions of poverty and reforms to improve conditions. This volume, and the others in the SSRC series, provides Western scholars with an accessible English language look at the state of current scholarship in China and, as such, does not simply provide information for the direct study of socio-political issues, but also for meta-level analysis of how the domestic scholarship in China is developing and assessing the interplay of the country's political and economic reforms with the society and daily life of its people.

First Published in 2008. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

IMF Financial Operations 2016 provides a broad introduction to how the IMF fulfills its mission through its financial activities. It covers the financial structure and operations of the IMF and also provides background detail of the financial statements for the IMF's activities during the most recent financial year. This publication (currently in its third edition) updates a previous report entitled Financial Organization and Operations of the IMF, first published in 1986 and last issued in 2001 (the sixth edition). That 2001 report reflected the seismic shifts in the global economy and in the IMF's structure and operations that occurred after the fall of the Soviet Union and the various currency and financial crises of the 1990s. This revised and updated report covers more recent developments, including reform of the IMF’s income model, measures taken in response to the global financial crisis of 2007–09, and the institutional reforms aimed at ensuring that the IMF's governance structure evolves in line with developments in the global economy.

Despite global economic disparities, recent years have seen rapid technological changes in developing countries, as it is now common to see people across all levels of society with smartphones in their hands and computers in their homes. However, does access to Information Communication Technologies (ICTs) actually improve the day-to-day lives of low-income citizens? This book argues that access to the internet can help alleviate poverty, improve development outcomes, and is now vital for realizing many human rights. This book posits that good governance is essential to the realization of inclusive pro-poor development goals, and puts forward policy recommendations that aim to mitigate the complex digital divide by employing governance as the primary actor. In making his argument, the author provides a quantitative analysis of developing countries, conjoined with a targeted in-depth study of Mexico. This mixed method approach provides an intriguing case for how improvements in the quality of governance impacts both ICT penetration, and poverty alleviation. Overall, the book challenges the neoliberal deterministic perspective that the open market will "solve" technology diffusion, and argues instead that good governance is the lynchpin that creates conducive conditions for ICTs to make an impact on poverty alleviation. In fact, the digital divide should not be considered binary, rather it is a multifaceted problem where income, education, and language all need to be considered to address it effectively. This book will be useful for researchers/students of development, communication technologies, and comparative politics as well as for development practitioners and policy makers with an interest in how modern technology is impacting the poor in the developing world.

This report looks at small-scale aquaculture from the viewpoint of poverty reduction. What are the main factors that enable fish farming to generate livelihoods and reduce poverty? Based on case studies, the first part of the report highlights the importance of access to capital assets--human, social, natural, physical, and financial--and to a range of transforming processes, such as markets, institutions, facilities, infrastructure, and services.

The issues surrounding poverty and inequality continue to be of central concern to academics, politicians and policy makers but the ways in which we seek to study and understand them continue to change over time. This accessible book seeks to provide a guide to some of the new approaches that have been developed in the light of international initiatives to reduce poverty and the notable changes in income inequality and poverty that have occurred across many western countries in recent years. These new approaches have to some degree been facilitated by the emergence of new techniques and a growing availability of data that enable cross national comparisons not only of income but also of measures of welfare such as educational achievement, nutritional status in developing countries and wealth and deprivation indicators in the developed world. Including specially commissioned research from a distinguished list of international authors, this volume makes a real contribution to the public debate surrounding inequality and poverty as well as providing new empirical information about them from around the world.

This study systematically investigates the development process, major characteristics and weak links of China's poverty alleviation experience and conducts a comparative analysis of poverty alleviation cases. It also accurately presents the internal logic and core elements of China's poverty alleviation theory and taking the Chinese experience of poverty alleviation refines the "Two Threads One Force" theoretical framework to make a basic judgment of the "China model" for poverty alleviation. It also presents the rationale and plans for responding to new challenges to achieve poverty alleviation goals, which will enhance the welfare of the people and promote social progress and national prosperity.