In 2013, the World Bank Group announced two goals that would guide its operations worldwide. First is the eradication of chronic extreme poverty bringing the number of extremely poor people, defined as those living on less than 1.25 purchasing power parity (PPP)†“adjusted dollars a day, to less than 3 percent of the world’s population by 2030.The second is the boosting of shared prosperity, defined as promoting the growth of per capita real income of the poorest 40 percent of the population in each country. In 2015, United Nations member nations agreed in New York to a set of post-2015 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the first and foremost of which is the eradication of extreme poverty everywhere, in all its forms. Both the language and the spirit of the SDG objective reflect the growing acceptance of the idea that poverty is a multidimensional concept that reflects multiple deprivations in various aspects of well-being. That said, there is much less agreement on the best ways in which those deprivations should be measured, and on whether or how information on them should be aggregated. Monitoring Global Poverty: Report of the Commission on Global Poverty advises the World Bank on the measurement and monitoring of global poverty in two areas: What should be the interpretation of the definition of extreme poverty, set in 2015 in PPP-adjusted dollars a day per person? What choices should the Bank make regarding complementary monetary and nonmonetary poverty measures to be tracked and made available to policy makers? The World Bank plays an important role in shaping the global debate on combating poverty, and the indicators and data that the Bank collates and makes available shape opinion and actual policies in client countries, and, to a certain extent, in all countries. How we answer the above questions can therefore have a major influence on the global economy.

This book explores the multi-faceted world of aid and development co-operation. It traces the history of aid, explains where it come from and where it’s going, and asks whether it’s achieving as much as it could.

Sustaining the fight against global poverty will be possible only if the "wider civil society", i.e. citizens in richer countries, actively and critically support international development co-operation efforts. The willingness undoubtedly exists ...

For anyone wanting to learn, in practical terms, how to measure, describe, monitor, evaluate, and analyze poverty, this Handbook is the place to start. It is designed to be accessible to people with a university-level background in science or the social sciences. It is an invaluable tool for policy analysts, researchers, college students, and government officials working on policy issues related to poverty and inequality.

In 2013, the government abolished the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA), which had been Canada’s flagship foreign aid agency for decades, and transferred its functions to the newly renamed Department of Foreign Affairs, Trade and Development (DFATD). As the government is rethinking Canadian aid and its relationship with other foreign policy and commercial objectives, the time is ripe to rethink Canadian aid more broadly. Edited by Stephen Brown, Molly den Heyer and David R. Black, this is the first book on Canadian foreign aid since CIDA was folded into DFATD. Designed to reach a variety of audiences, contributions by twenty-one scholars and experts in the field offer an incisive examination of Canada’s record and recent changes in Canadian foreign aid, such as its focus on maternal and child health and on the extractive sector. Many chapters also ask more fundamental questions concerning the intersection of the moral imperative that underpins aid and the trend towards greater self-interest. For instance, what are and what should be the underlying motives of Canadian aid? How compatible are altruism and self-interest in foreign aid? To what extent should aid be integrated with Canada’s other policies and practices? The portrait that emerges is a sobering one. This book is essential reading for anyone interested in Canada’s changing role in the world and how it reflects on Canada.