 I have the good fortune of presenting the cheery case of growth with poverty reduction. And the five countries that are categorized in this category are Ethiopia, Ghana, Malawi, Rwanda, and Uganda. Some of the countries that you would expect to see here, though one Malawi might be a bit controversial place here, but we will discuss it and see why we have decided to do so. So what I would like to do is just very briefly talk about each of these countries and their experiences and then talk about some common themes in terms of measurement and in terms of the countries themselves. But before doing this, let's establish why these countries are in this category. So what we have here are the per capita GDP growth rates from 1998 through 2014. And we're really looking at the first decade of the century in these five case studies. So you can see that we've had growth rates between zero and 10%, but generally on average about 5% throughout these five cases. And here's the corresponding poverty reduction. So we've seen some different experiences, but generally we see over the course of the decade that is being considered declines in poverty, whether it's consistent over the time or not, it depends on the country. And we've also seen different regional experiences. Naturally you see less poverty in urban areas than in the national and the rural statistics. And you also see some different experiences here, such as Uganda, where we actually see some, just a leveling off of urban poverty, in fact some rises in later years. In rural areas, naturally, poverty rates are higher than in urban. And we generally see reduced poverty in the latter part of the decade. Though that's not always the case in some of the countries like Ghana, the poverty reduction here was in the earlier part of the decade. So it's hard to generalize about all of them, but over the course of this decade we do see poverty reduction that is accompanying the growth. Now turning to Ethiopia, Ethiopia has been characterized by broad base growth over the past 15 years. And the period that we're looking here is 2000 to 2011. This growth has been reasonably steady on the aggregate, but uneven in terms of poverty reduction. In urban areas, we've seen persistent poverty reduction between 2000 falling from 39 percent to 22 percent to 13 percent over the five years for which we have data at the national level. In rural areas, stagnated in the first half of the decade, but then fell considerably in the latter half. In terms of non-monetary measures such as schooling, nutrition, mortality rates, access to public goods, these are all measures that are consistent with the story that we're seeing on the monetary level with GDP growth and monetary poverty. We see persistent welfare improvements. Naturally, there are issues of data comparability, and many will argue about the comparability of the household survey data. And we've tried to address that by estimating different poverty lines and different deflation rates for our consumption aggregates. And those poverty numbers are not the official poverty numbers. These are those that we estimated using a utility consistent approach that Channing are and can similar have developed. But the body of the evidence here, the monetary and the non-monetary evidence paints a picture of substantive welfare improvements. So what's been going on in Ethiopia? The economic landscape has been changing markedly. Through an agricultural led industrialization strategy, the government has really targeted the agricultural sector, and consequently we also see increased agricultural production and commercialization of this agriculture. Part of the strategy of the government has been to develop the infrastructure through massive investments in roads, hydroelectric dams, and telecommunications. And at the same consequence of this, we're finding that markets are functioning better. So we see wholesale markets, for example, for food markets, cereal markets are better integrated, marketing margins are much smaller. There's more competition in them. Part of the agricultural led industrialization strategy has also been to improve agricultural productivity and efforts have been made through agricultural extension programs and to the extent that there are some 45,000 extension agents in Ethiopia today, and this is the largest number of extension agents per person throughout Africa. It's arguable that the agricultural production growth has been through extensification, but there's indicators that some growth might be following through intensification if this pays off. Now, in response to chronic food insecurity in rural areas, the donors along with the Ethiopian government have developed an extensive social welfare program, the productive safety net program, and this is designed to prevent asset depletion at times of shocks. And thus far, the evaluations are coming out quite positive on the impact of this. The targeting as well as the impact. There remain challenges, of course. Given its dependence on primary commodities and rain-fed agriculture, Ethiopia is vulnerable to exogenous shocks. Agricultural productivity remains low and manufacturing growth remains low and inhibited largely by access to credit and power. Economic policy management is also a challenge for Ethiopia. There have been high bouts of inflation over the past decade, and so there remain challenges. Ghana now turning to Ghana. Ghana has experienced consistent growth over the past 30 years. It has rapid growth in the services sector, though moderate or modest agricultural growth. Ghana's had observed progress in terms of monetary poverty. In urban sectors, the poverty fell between 1998 and 2005 by some nine percentage points, but then leveled off in the latter part of the decade. Similarly, in rural areas, you saw rapid decline in poverty and then leveling off in the latter part of the decade as well. There also been progress in non-monetary measures of poverty in line with the monetary measures. I'm going through this pretty quickly, given that I have five cases to go over with you. A key feature of Ghana as well as the other countries in this grouping is political stability, and indeed Ghana has had two peaceful transitions of government during this period as well. Challenges remained. There are struggles with effective macroeconomic and fiscal policy management as evidenced by the recent IMF loan. The manufacturing sector growth and private investment remained slow, and as a consequence, the economic transformation is slow as well. Monetary poverty has been slow to respond to growth, and this may be a consequence of rising inequality as well as high poverty in agriculture. Oil production, this could be a positive for Ghana, but emphasizing that this could also be a challenge that it requires prudent management of the resources. Turning to Malawi. Malawi has experienced rapid broad-based growth in the latter half of the decade, some 7% during this time period, and this growth has been experienced in various different sectors, but arguably agriculture is the most important of these, experiencing some 10% growth and making up some 30% value added. Many will argue that this is attributable to the farm input subsidy program, a massive investment in increasing productivity, and given the growth in agricultural production and overall growth in the economy, there are expectations that growth would be pro-poor. The official poverty estimates, however, do not support this. Indeed, they find that national poverty fell marginally and rural poverty rose. Were these annual growth rates? Those are annual growth rates. The authors of this case take issue with the use of a single national poverty line and not adjusting for differences in relative prices in the various regions. The idea that the relative prices might not, or the official CPI might not affect the differences in relative prices across the regions, nor appropriately address the representative of inflation for the poor. Using this utility-consistent approach that I mentioned for Ethiopia as well, they calculate regional poverty lines for these two survey years and find that indeed national poverty fell, not marginally but substantially, and that rural poverty did not rise but also fell substantially. And urban poverty fell as well. Now, why are we concerned that placing Malawi in this category of relative growth and corresponding poverty reduction is... Sure, the revised poverty estimates indicate the poverty reduction is consistent with income growth and improved non-monetary welfare measures. But the short spell that we're observing this five-year time period is largely driven by increases in agricultural production and the durability of this trend is really open to question, especially if it's dependent on a national input subsidy program. Turning to Rwanda, Rwanda has sustained growth since the post-conflict period, approximately 4% per year. Poverty reduction has also accompanied this growth. Between 2000 and 2005, it fell by 2.2 percentage points and the latter half of the decade by nearly 12 percentage points. Rwanda also is characterized by high inequality, one of the highest genies in the region, and experienced some rise in inequality in the first part of the decade and then a fall in inequality, though reasonably small magnitudes, which may help to explain some of the differences in the poverty reduction. Non-monetary welfare also observed improvements across the board. So why so successful in Rwanda could just be post-conflict catch-up? That's entirely possible. The massive aid inflows that followed the conflict as well. But it could also be due to what Booth and Goluba Mutebi described as the developmental authoritarian state, which has increased the budget allocations towards health, education, and agriculture, and has promoted private sector development and has quite ingeniously established a set of arrangements for managing economic rents so that they don't get out of hand or destructive. But given lack of evaluation, this is speculation at this point as what the key contributors are. Challenges remain as well. While we find that the objective monetary and non-monetary measures find that there have been improvements, there have been more pessimistic findings at the qualitative field work at the local level, where people just tend not to feel better off. This may be due to positioning and the relative improvements, but there's also lack of progress in voice and accountability. So people just aren't feeling as empowered. High inequality remains a challenge not just within regions, but between Kigali and the rest of the country. Now, turning to Uganda, since 1986, Uganda has experienced impressive growth approximately just under 7% per year in real GDP. Official poverty estimates have also shown impressive declines in poverty, from 57% in the early 90s to roughly 20% in 2012. And these many attribute this to far-reaching economic reforms. But there's a question of how is this growth shared, given the spatial heterogeneity of the experiences in Uganda? Now, the question of degrees of progress, if you will. So when looking at asset and non-monetary measures, the progress is not quite as impressive as the poverty and real GDP numbers suggest. Alternate estimates of poverty based on assets in the DHS using small-area estimation methods by Daniels and Minow find that, indeed, there has been poverty reduction, but has been slower than the official poverty estimates suggest. In this case study, the authors also use a utility-consistent approach to estimating poverty lines. And they find as well that there are higher levels of poverty than the official poverty estimates, and that there have been reductions, but at a more moderated pace than the official levels. And they also find a rising urban poverty rate after 2010. And some would attribute, so we saw this earlier in the figures, the slowdown in poverty reduction both in the urban and rural areas, but in the rural areas attributed to a tepid performance in agriculture. Now, to get to some common themes, the first in terms of measurement, all of these cases have data issues. That is quite unexpected. We always have issues of data issues, but we work carefully to triangulate our results to not just look at monetary poverty and growth, but also non-monetary measures. And data issues in terms of comparability or rebasing of the GDP in Ghana are issues such as those. Now, another point is that monetary poverty is quite volatile. It really depends on when the survey was conducted, given that they're not conducted every year. For example, in Ethiopia using the Ethiopian Rural Household Survey, if you look, estimate the poverty rates of the 1,500 households in the survey, it fell from 55% to 35% between 1995 and 2004. But then when we estimate them again in 2009, it bounces up to 52%. Now, is that a trend? Likely not given the spike in food prices at this time, as well as the drought that was experienced there. And so again, this gives us a motivation for multi-dimensional assessment of poverty just to get a broader picture of this. And given that non-monetary measures are more easily measured and more stable. So then getting to each of these countries, this is my last slide, I promise, Arnie, that each of these countries is characterized by peace and stability, especially the post-conflict economies. This is a precondition for the growth that we observe. But threats remain. There's no certainty that there might be unrest in any of these countries that we're looking at. But the governments are doing a better job of providing peace and security in these countries. The role of agriculture is especially important in all of these countries where we've seen progress as an initial driver of poverty and indicates that there are potential returns to effective policies. So we look at Ethiopia and Malawi where we've seen these impressive increases in agricultural production in the latter years. Whereas in Uganda, while there has been poverty reduction, it hasn't seen quite as much given the tepid agricultural production there. So in short, there have been successes so far, but challenges remain. And we're happy to talk more about this. Thank you.