The Selected Issues paper discusses Cambodia’s poverty and growth, private sector development, public financial management reform, and debt sustainability. It summarizes the Poverty Assessment and describes the regime of tax incentives, costs, and limits for private investment. It also summarizes the assessment of Cambodia’s Public Expenditure Management system and Public Financial Management Reform Program. It highlights the key reform priorities, and provides historical background on Cambodia’s external and domestic debt. It also includes a statistical appendix and a summary of the tax system.
Before the world can answer questions about how poverty is reduced, it needs to know how progress can be measured. But estimates of the number of the world’s poor and questions about whether it has been decreasing or increasing have given rise to one of the hottest controversies in the development community. Angus Deaton, Professor of Economics and International Affairs at Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School, who has looked in detail at India’s poverty numbers, has been at the center of this debate. He speaks here with Prakash Loungani of the IMF’s External Relations Department about the dimensions of the problem and what can be done to provide more transparent and more reliable data on the world’s poor.
Measures of poverty figure prominently in debates on the social impact ofeconomic policies and are now routinely used to design targeted interventions to fight poverty. This, coupled with the prominence given to the UN Millennium Development Goal of halving the poverty rate in the world by 2015 (relative to 1990), highlights the need for close scrutiny of poverty data and measures. At a February 4 IMF Institute seminar, Martin Ravallion, Research Manager in the Development Research Group of the World Bank, reviewed current methods of measuring poverty and discussed their role in the debate over globalization’s impact on poverty and inequality.