This volume, a co-publication of the World Bank and Oxford University Press, is an important milestone in an effort to provide empirical tools that match development challenges faced by policymakers and to satisfy their need to evaluate complex public actions.Development is about fundamental change in economic structures, about the movement of resources out of agriculture to services and industry, about migration to cities and international movement of labour, and about transformation in trade and technology. Social inclusion and change in health and life expectancy, in education and literacy, in population size and structure, and in gender relations, are at the heart of the story. The policy challenge lies in helping to release and guide these forces of change and inclusion. The toolkit reviewed in this publicationresults from an extensive collaborative effort between practitioners and researchers in government, universities, aid agencies, NGOs and other development institutions, to build and test various techniques to evaluate the poverty and distributional impact of economic policy choices.