The Path Dependency of Poverty Reduction Policies

The evolutionary paths followed by poverty reduction policies in the advanced and in the developing countries have been quite different. The paper endorses the view whereby the higher is the initial level of income inequality in a country, the less the subsequent GDP growth is bound to "trickle down" to the poor. Due to the perverse interplay between growth, income inequality and inequality of opportunity, the tight correlation between material and non-material conditions of life often prevents low-income countries to reduce the size and the intensity of poverty. After the low-income countries’ involvement in globalization, the construction of indices of multidimensional poverty is taken as decisive by international organizations to carefully design anti-poverty aid policies by taking into account the specific characteristics of the area of intervention.