"In 2000, governments made a commitment through the Millennium Development Goals to reduce poverty and hunger by half by 2015. However, despite the reorientation of much of aid policy towards the fight against poverty, there are concerns that many countries will be unable to make meaningful dents in their levels of poverty, let alone meet the lofty goals. At the centre of these concerns is whether countries are following the right development path, and whether lessons have been learned from the strategies of newly industrialized countries that drastically reduced poverty relatively quickly and without much dependence on international development assistance. This book is about pathways to poverty reduction that emphasize employment-centred structural change, social policies that both protect citizens and contribute to economic development, and types of politics that support growth and redistribution. It draws on the experiences of countries that transformed their economies and reduced poverty in very short periods"--