What is “Pro-Poor”?

Assessing whether distributional changes are “pro-poor” has become increasingly widespread in academic and policy circles. Starting from relatively general ethical axioms, this paper proposes simple graphical methods to test whether distributional changes are indeed pro-poor. Pro-poor standards are first defined. An important issue is whether these standards should be absolute or relative. Another issue is whether pro-poor judgements should put relatively more emphasis on the impact of growth upon the poorer of the poor. Having formalized the treatment of these issues, the paper describes various ways for checking whether broad classes of ethical judgements will declare a distributional change to be pro-poor.