What’s behind pro-poor growth? An investigation of its drivers and dynamics

Stephan Klasen, Thomas Kneib, Maria C. Lo Bue () and Vincenzo Prete
Additional contact information
Thomas Kneib: University of Göttingen
Maria C. Lo Bue: University of Trieste
Vincenzo Prete: University of Palermo

The Journal of Economic Inequality, 2025, vol. 23, issue 1, No 3, 43-69

Abstract: Abstract Standard growth incidence curves describe how growth episodes impact on the overall income distribution. However, measuring the pro-poorness of the growth process is complex due to measurement errors, and to the effect of shocks that may hit the percentiles of the income distribution in different ways. Therefore, standard growth incidence curves may misrepresent the true growth process and its distributive impact. Relying on a non-anonymous approach, we compare actual growth episodes at each percentile of the initial personalized distribution with counterfactual mobility profiles which rule out the presence of shocks. We consider Indonesia in 2000–2007 and 2007–2014, two growth spells in which there was substantial, significant upward mobility among the initially poorer, a sizeable part of which cannot be explained by unobserved individual endowments or standard socio-economic attributes. The difference between actual and expected growth is related, in the early 2000s, to the economy-wide transformations, which characterized the early years of the post-Suharto era. However, in the more recent years, it can be largely attributed to individual recovery from previous negative losses and high vulnerability and reactivity to shocks for the poor.

Keywords: Indonesia; Shocks; Pro-poorness; Mobility (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D31 I3 O12 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s10888-024-09628-7 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:joecin:v:23:y:2025:i:1:d:10.1007_s10888-024-09628-7

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/journal/10888

DOI: 10.1007/s10888-024-09628-7

Access Statistics for this article

The Journal of Economic Inequality is currently edited by Stephen Jenkins

More articles in The Journal of Economic Inequality from Springer, Society for the Study of Economic Inequality Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().