Adjustment and Poverty Evidence: A Response to Weeks

The paper responds to a comment by John Weeks on an earlier article by the authors. He maintains that the macroeconomic index used in that article was ‘invalid for its purpose’, and that the survey evidence of poverty change was inconsistent with national accounts data. The authors maintain that although the macroeconomic policy index has its limitations, it succeeds in capturing the changes in macropolicy during the periods. Using the data that Weeks himself provides, the authors also show that the national accounts estimates are in fact consistent with the survey evidence in all countries but one. The central proposition of the original paper therefore stands: poverty declined in countries where macroeconomic policies improved, and increased where they worsened. © 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.