 You hear people saying that inequality inevitably rises during the spells of economic growth and growth is not poverty reducing, it leaves the poor behind. There's always some truth in some cases that happens, but what I've tried to do is just look at the evidence systematically across as many countries as possible. And the evidence is not so clear. In fact, if you wanted to summarize it in a few key stylized facts, if you like, on average inequality neither increases nor decreases during spells of growth. In other words, half the time during spells of growth we see rising inequality, half the time we see falling inequality. So immediately the idea that inequality necessarily rises in growing economies is not correct. In a stylized fact, poverty does tend to fall typically in growing economies. Absolute poverty, the incidence of poverty measured by a fixed poverty line and fixed in real terms, tends to fall during spells of economic growth. Now I say tends because there are exceptions. Of course people observe things on the ground in places and understandably they come to conclusions, yes things seem to be getting worse and in some cases they are, but as a empirical generalization it doesn't hold up. Typically poverty, absolute poverty tends to fall with economic growth. I emphasize absolute poverty because that's another important aspect. Whenever there's a disconnect between what people say from the ground up, what NGOs say and what the scientists, economists say, looking at data, you've got to look at it carefully because sometimes it's something to do with how you're measuring things with the data and not just that people are wrong when they look at things on the ground. And that idea of absolute poverty, remember that that's a fixed standard, fixed over time. I think when people think about poverty in some economies they don't use a fixed standard. The standard is changing over time, they've got more of a concept of relative poverty. Then things will be more ambiguous. When I said before that absolute poverty tends to fall in growing developing countries, it's not so clear for relative poverty, in fact a lot of the time we see rising relative poverty doing spells of economic growth. So you've got to be very careful about what concepts you're using when you answer these questions. If I may put a third stylized fact to complete the picture, even though economic growth tends to come with lower absolute poverty, it has very different impacts on poverty in different places. It's another thing we've learned. There's enormous heterogeneity. The same rate of growth could bring you anything from a modest reduction in poverty to a dramatic reduction in poverty. Why is that? That's an important question. We've got to understand a lot about the economy's concern. But one of the really striking things is how important initial inequality is to how much impact growth has on poverty reduction. So although I said that inequality tends to increase half the time, decrease half the time in growing economies, that sort of suggests well it's not such an issue. Well of course it matters big time whether you're in the inequality increasing country or the inequality decreasing country, so it really does matter to the countries concerned. But it also means that even if inequality doesn't change, the level of inequality is very important to how much impact you have from economic growth. And finally we've also started to learn that the level of inequality is important to how much economic growth you have. So it matters in two ways. High levels of inequality make it harder to grow the economy and they make it harder for the growth that occurs to help poor people. Propoor growth is well defined. Inclusive growth is not so well defined. So let me start with propoor growth. By propoor growth I mean growth that reduces poverty. If you agree on a poverty measure, then propoor growth is something that any growth processes that reduces that poverty measure. Now that poverty measure as I've emphasized could be absolute, maybe it's relative. And that maybe is an entirely defensible concept of poverty. So but given that concept I would argue the only consistent way of defining propoor growth is growth that reduces poverty. Now there is a debate about this. Some people say growth is only propoor if the distribution of the growth benefits the poor if you like. If the growth rate for the poor has a higher than the average growth rate. That's one interpretation. I would argue the concern with that is that how is it consistent necessarily with the poverty measure you're using? So I'd point to, I'd say get your thinking clear on how you should measure poverty. Once you've settled on that, absolute relative, so-called weekly relative measures, make it sensible and that means make it understood and accepted in the country you're talking about. Once you agree on that, then I think the definition of propoor should follow from that. My interpret includes the first meaning that over a wider range of poverty lines. You may say well for one thing the poverty line could be contention over whether the poverty line is $1.25, $1.50, $2 a day of course. Across the world poverty lines vary from roughly $1 a day to over $40 a day. In very rich countries the highest is Luxembourg. You may say well I don't necessarily agree the dollar a day, fine. I'm not going to quarrel with that. As long as you're very clear about the concept you're using. So let's consider a wider range of poverty lines. I'd argue then propoor growth is the same concept of propoor growth as applied at a wider range of lines. And I'd say that's a reasonable definition of inclusive growth. But this is not settled at all because people use that term in different ways. Maybe not just talking about income poverty. They're only talking about other dimensions of welfare. They're only talking about people's ability to participate politically in the society. These are important things. And the concept of inclusive growth may have to embrace more than just income poverty reduction. I think we're making amazing progress since 1980s, back even before that. I think what we've seen since the year 2000 which I didn't talk about today is a remarkable acceleration in poverty reduction across the developing world. Again we're talking about absolute extreme poverty. People living under $1.25 a day. In other words people living who are poor by the standards of the poorest countries. $1.25 a day is not some arbitrary number. It's the average poverty line of the poorest countries in the world. So we're applying a very, very low standard, no question. But we've still got many people, over a billion people living below that poverty line. $1.2 billion right now. But I think if that trajectory continues since 2000, and that trajectory is not just China. We're seeing across the developing world, including in sub-Saharan Africa, things are looking much better. I think a lot of policies are in place now. A lot of changes happened. A greater emphasis on delivering services to poor people. A huge amount of work to do. But if we can maintain the momentum of this change, I'm quite confident we could virtually eliminate extreme absolute poverty within a few decades by 2030 or so. Now virtually eliminate that last few percent is going to be very difficult. We're talking about getting, say, lifting 1 billion people out of poverty, so bringing the poverty rate down to about 3%. That's, I think, very doable with a set of policies that are roughly in place with strengthening in many areas, with greater emphasis in some countries. But I'm quite optimistic if we can maintain that momentum. Oh, I think very important is bringing researchers together who are working on poverty across the world. There are very few events that do that. It's quite unusual to have a conference that's so focused on poverty and inequality and this conference on Africa. And that's really valuable. I've just been in a session where I've been hearing papers on Mozambique, on Africa, on Rwanda, on South Africa, by people working in those countries, coming from all over the place. And it's exciting. We have a meeting of professionals who have devoted themselves and are putting their best analytic skills to the task of measuring and quantifying poverty and forming anti-poverty policy. And bringing them together is a first order contribution to the cause of using good analysis for fighting poverty.