This paper investigates how estimates of the extent and trend of consumption poverty in China between 1990 and 2001 vary as a result of alternative plausible assumptions concerning the poverty line and estimated levels of consumption. Our methodology focuses on the following sources of variation: alternative purchasing power parity conversion factors (used to convert an international poverty line), alternative estimates of the level and distribution

This paper examines the phenomenon of real-income stagnation (in which real income growth is negligible or negative for a sizable uninterrupted sequence of years). It analyzes data for four decades from a large cross-section of countries. Real income stagnation is a conceptually distinct phenomenon from low average growth and other features of the growth sequence that have been held to be of interest in the literature. We find that real income stagnation