This book brings together the latest thinking about poverty dynamics from diverse analytic traditions. While covering a vast body of conceptual and empirical knowledge about economic and social mobility, it takes the reader on compelling journeys of multigenerational accounts of three villages in Kanartaka, India, twelve years in the life of a street child in Burkina Faso, and much more. Leading development practitioners and scholars from the fields of anthropology, economics, political science, and sociology critically examine the literature from their disciplines and contribute new frameworks and evidence from their own works.

The Moving Out of Poverty series launched in 2007 is under the editorial direction of Deepa Narayan, Senior Advisor of the World Bank and former director of the pathbreaking Voices of the Poor series. It features the results of new comparative research across more than 500 communities in 15 countries to understand how and why people move out of poverty, and presents other work which builds on interdisciplinary and contextually grounded understandings of growth and poverty reduction.