Who Benefits from Economic Development?: Reply.

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    • Abstract:
      The article focuses on beneficiaries of economic development. The author's 1977 paper had two purposes, one methodological and one empirical. The methodological goal was to apply in the case of a less-developed country a largely overlooked class of absolute measures which gauge directly the extent to which the poor gain from economic development. At the time the author wrote the paper that is in 1975, absolute poverty measures had seldom been used in a dynamic context in studies of developing countries, to measure who benefits how much from economic development within a country. The author shows that those who wish to give predominant weight to countries' progress toward alleviating economic misery might find absolute measures like changes in proportion of income units which are poor and changes in average income among the poor, more convenient than the more familiar measures of relative inequality. The empirical goal was to reexamine the specific case of Brazilian growth in the 1960's. Toward that end, the author's results established that the same income distribution data, when analyzed from an absolute rather than from a relative perspective, yielded a qualitatively distinct and decidedly more positive picture of who benefited.