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This paper aims to investigate the effectiveness of Baitul Maal wat Tamwil (BMT) in reducing poverty.

The case study approach on BMT MMU Sidogiri (located at East Java Province) is taken. Two important and dominating products of BMT MMU Sidogiri (i.e. ba’i bithaman ‘ajil (BBA) and mudarabah) are examined carefully on how much they have helped the customers in reducing their poverty. The paper goes beyond data measurement using descriptive statistics, paired t-test and some poverty measurement indexes such as headcount index; poverty gap; Sen index; and Foster, Greer and Thorbecke Index to investigate the effectiveness of the BMT in reducing poverty.

This paper reveals that BMT financing is effective in reducing poverty. Most of respondents can increase their income after receiving BMT financing. Products of BMT, especially BBA and mudarabah, to empower the poor in various productive businesses have been able to reduce the extent and severity of poverty. This paper also discloses some interesting and important findings related with how BMT’s work, so that it can contribute more to the knowledge enrichment, as well as the development of BMTs, in general, in realising their mission.

The establishment of the so-called BMT in the form of an Islamic microfinance is intended initially to effectively help the poor. At present, there are around 3,874 BMTs operating around the country. Although the BMTs have been existing since more than ten years, no research has been conducted to examine their effectiveness in alleviating the poverty. This study in aimed at fulfilling this important gap.

As the essential requirement of socialism with Chinese characteristics, common prosperity stands for both the goal of and the approach to economic growth. Shared development is a new stage of the process of common prosperity. From the perspective of economic growth, it requires the low- and middle-income groups to gain more from the growth than high-income groups. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

Based on provincial panel data, the random effect model and the dynamic panel model are used in this paper to analyze the path to achieve pro-poor growth.

The keys to achieve pro-poor growth are first to promote new urbanization with people at the center, diversify the forms of employment and improve the income structure of the residents, and second to improve the accuracy in designing redistribution policies.

After the realization of “some get rich first” policy, it is important to swiftly adapt to a new mindset of shared development, which charters a new course to the Marxist common prosperity. There exist few established economic theories or action plans with respect to shared development. Pro-poor growth, however, offers a perspective to achieve both sharing and development.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate empirically the effects of different dimensions of social capital on the well-being of farmers in China’s undeveloped poverty-stricken areas, and study the equivalent multiple of social capital and income compensation.

The paper opted for an exploratory study using the open-ended approach of grounded theory, including 1,176 interviews with rural households in poverty-stricken areas in China. The data were complemented by documentary analysis. Then an econometric model of social capital and farmers’ well-being was applied to the data.

The results show that the number frequently visiting relatives, reciprocity, participation and trust level are significantly positively related to the well-being of the farmers, and the level of participation in social capital requires the most income compensation, while the level of trust comes second.

This paper can serve as a template for developing a useful tool that can be fitted to national or regional data for studying the effects of social capital on the well-being of farmers in poor areas or countries and for calculating the concrete equivalent multiple of social capital and income compensation.

Currently, Malaysia uses the Poverty Line Income (PLI) to measure poverty. This is because income measurement is the easiest way to collect data, but in its simplicity, it fails to capture the broader meaning and implications of poverty. Asset index is one of the non-monetary poverty measurements which have been established by researchers but not used in measuring poverty in Malaysia. A household might be poor in income, but assets may prevent them from being trapped in poverty.

This study will reassess the poverty of 302 households in the Northern States of Malaysia using the asset index and also the current state of poverty incidence with change under asset index.

The results show that households in the Northern States of Malaysia are interpreted as being ‘poorer’ when poverty is measured using assets as opposed to income alone. Besides that, poverty incidence of Malay households, households living in urban area and households with middle-aged heads have high poverty incidence, while households with a head of households that is single and highly educated have low poverty incidence. The logistic regression analysis shows that the determinants of poverty incidence based on the asset index are Indian, Penang and Perak State, the age of the head of household, distance to the education centre from home.

This study shows the asset index measurement which have not been done in Malaysia. This will contribute to the improvement of poverty measurement of the country.

This paper deals with poverty decompositions into subgroups defined with respect to intervals of income and the robustness of comparisons of the absolute contribution of such groups to poverty. For instance, world poverty estimates by the World Bank often distinguish between the extreme poor whose incomes are lower than $1.25 a day (in PPP terms) and the other poor with incomes between $1.25 and $2.5 a day. Existing dominance conditions can tell whether overall poverty and extreme poverty have declined in a robust manner when comparing countries at two points of time, but they cannot say anything for the contribution of the non-extreme poor to overall poverty. In the present paper we propose stochastic generalized dominance criteria to perform robust poverty ordering when the focus is placed on some interval of the poverty domain. Using generated data based on grouped data from World Bank’s PovcalNet tool, the paper finally investigates whether the robust decline of extreme poverty around the world during the last decades was also accompanied by a decline of the contribution of non-extreme poverty.

This paper is a study on child poverty from two perspectives: child income poverty (derived from family income) and child deprivation (evaluated by non‐monetary indicators). On the one hand, empirical evidence supports the thesis that income‐based poverty measures and deprivation measures do not overlap. On the other hand, the relationship between poverty and the child's living conditions is not linear. Uses micro‐econometric techniques to analyse child income poverty and present deprivation indicators, and thereby an index of child deprivation, to study child poverty. The measurements used are centred on the child. The results obtained support the thesis that the study of child poverty differs whether the focus is on the child or on the family.

Outlines a method for controlling for compositional factors in the measurement of poverty. Bases the method on “shift‐share analysis” and “direct standardization”, consistent with Sen’s (1976) influential axiomatic approach to poverty measurement. Employs the popular poverty index proposed by Foster et al. (1984), which is one of the few summary poverty measures that can be directly standardized and also meets Sen’s criteria. The method is illustrated by examining the trend in absolute and relative poverty in the UK. Uses data from the “Family Expenditure Survey”, covering the period 1968 to 1986, and places specific empirical focus on the relationship between household structure and poverty.