Poverty, in its universality, seems immediately understandable and yet, as a global problem, its dissolution remains highly complex.To illustrate what it means to live at the poverty line, Stefen Chow and Huiyi Lin visited thirty-six cities on six continents, and examined poverty with regards to food. From the local markets, they bought vegetables, fruits, cereal products, proteins and snacks - the amount of food they could afford per day based on the respective poverty line definition set by each government. They photographed the resulting pile of food, placed on a page of a local newspaper they bought that day. Using visual typology and artistic research as their guiding principle, they carefully calibrated lighting and shooting distance to ensure uniformity and comparability. In this visual reader, Chow and Lin embark on an economic comparison between the thirty-six countries and territories making the problem of poverty visible and comprehensible. In addition to the examination of the poverty line and its meaning across the world, the duo selected nine foods available in most of the economies observed to illustrate the globalization of production and the variations in prices and consumption. The book is enriched by texts that shed light on issues around the poverty line as a global phenomenon: The authors relate to the challenges of our society and the UN 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development whose first of seventeen goals is to end poverty in all its forms.

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 IGO licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. Developing countries seek economic development which is broad-based or inclusive in the sense that it raises the income of all, especially the poor. Yet this is at odds with Simon Kuznets' hypothesis that economic development tends to put upward pressure on income inequality, at least initially and in the absence of countervailing policies. The Developer's Dilemma explores this 'Kuznetsian tension' between structural transformation and income inequality. The book asks: what are the varieties of structural transformation that have been experienced in developing countries? What inequality dynamics are associated with each variety of structural transformation? And what policies have been utilized to manage trade-offs between structural transformation, income inequality, and inclusive growth? Across nine country cases written by academics across the Global South, this book answers these questions using a comparative case study approach with a common analytical framework and a set of common datasets. The intended intellectual contribution of the book is to provide a comparative analysis of the relationship between structural transformation, income inequality, and inclusive growth; to do so empirically at a regional and national level, and to draw conclusions about the varieties of structural transformation, their inequality dynamics, and the policies that have been employed to mediate the developer's dilemma.