“…Given the salience of this issue to both policy makers and academics, an increasingly large literature analyzes the impact of changes in incomes and inequality on poverty, as well as their respective contributions towards poverty reduction in the past decades (Ravallion and Chen, 1997;Besley and Burgess, 2003;Bourguignon, 2003;Kraay, 2006;Kalwij and Verschoor, 2007;Bresson, 2009;Chambers and Dhongde, 2011). Collectively, these studies established not only that income growth is crucial to achieving sustained decreases in poverty but also that the benefits of income growth strongly depend on the initial levels of income and inequality.…”