Poorer states have also been able to lift a greater number of people out of poverty, implying a convergence in poverty rates across states (Allwine etal., To evaluate the contribution of policies to the observed improvements and get a sense of their effectiveness, a useful exercise is to decompose the respective contributions of the increasing pie and the improvements in distribution. By contrast, keeping the average income level constant w'hile applying only the change in income distribution to the households data allows an estimate of how' much redistribution alone contributed to poverty reduction. Such a decomposition reveals that between 52% and 56% of the observed decline in poverty can be traced back to growth, depending on the poverty definition applied, with the other half owing to successful policies that improved the income distribution.