Pro-Poor Growth Policies

One of three priority areas of IPC is to provide developing countries with policy advice and technical assistance to understand the nature and requirements for pro-poor growth as well as the policies that best promote it.

Objectives
Activities
Resources

Objectives

In recent years, many countries have approached UNDP for technical support and advisory services to assist them in better balancing national economic objectives with the deepening of pro-poor policies.

This has been true even in countries that have developed Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs) in response to the initiative launched by the World Bank and International Monetary Fund that links access to debt relief or concessional lending to the design of national pro-poor policy frameworks.

Independent assessments of the process have shown that most nations implementing PRSPs have not adequately reconfigured their macroeconomic policies to create the conditions required for rapid and sustained poverty reduction. General criticisms have suggested the PRSP timeline is too short and that the policy thrust still is too embedded in conventional fiscal and monetary concerns to favor human development goals.

IPC aims to enhance country capacities in designing and implementing effective policy frameworks that support pro-poor growth by encouraging the generation and dissemination of knowledge on the impacts of different policy interventions on poverty and inequality. It will also work to share country experiences where national capacities (institutional, research, political etc.) have been developed to analyze the linkages and policy options for ensuring a scenario of sustained growth with increased equity and declining poverty.

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Activities

To promote pro-poor growth policies, a major focus of IPC activities will be to enhance the coherence between macroeconomic, sectoral, and social policy regimes at the country-level by examining their distributive impacts among social groups.

Specific centre programs will be targeted at:

The centre will give special priority to activities that provide opportunities for comparative policy analysis among the experiences of several developing countries.

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Resources

Recognized research centers and think tanks can be found both in the North and South that are pushing the policy debate on pro-poor growth. These include CGD (USA), HSRC (South Africa), IDSJ (India), IETS (Brazil), ODI (United Kingdom) and REPOA (Tanzania), among many others.

Some organizations - such as the Bretton Woods Project, Oxfam, the PRSP Monitoring and Synthesis Project, and the Third World Network - have both international reach and global backing. Others are region-specific, including AFRODAD (Sub-Saharan Africa), EURODAD (Africa and Latin America), and the Economic Research Forum (Middle East and North Africa).

Click here for a list of additional links on this topic.

As a contribution to advancing knowledge about designing pro-poor growth policies, IPC will post and constantly update recently released publications for public access through its website.

Among recent works on this topic are:

Click here for a list of additional works on this topic.

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