Official poverty methodologies differ from other poverty measurement methods in the sense that the official ones are more often used as a benchmark to develop new policies as well as to evaluate the performance of existing programs. Europe has the tradition and the practice to use relative...

US poverty is much higher than poverty in Europe when a relative poverty measure is used. Using an absolute poverty measurement method, the picture looks different: poverty in some European countries is higher. This paper estimates poverty rates for all the countries of the (old) EU and the USA...

Financial poverty indicators still play an important role in policymaking and evaluation. Countries such as the USA and the EU member states use one or several ‘official’ poverty indicators on which success of poverty reduction policy is regularly monitored. Whereas the US poverty indicator...

Poverty indicators often disagree about whether a person is poor or not. Yet, when it comes to assessing whether a program is successful in reaching the poor the dominant practice is to use an income poverty indicator. This paper investigates whether the choice of welfare indicator influences...

Poverty indicators often disagree about whether a person is poor or not. Yet, when it comes to assessing whether a programme is successful in reaching the poor the dominant practice is to use an income poverty indicator. This paper investigates whether the choice of welfare indicator influences...

In transition and developing countries, we observe rather high levels of corruption even if they have democratic political systems. This is surprising from a political economy perspective, as the majority of people generally suffers from high corruption levels. Our model is based on the fact...

This paper takes an overview over the historical paths toward the Economic and Currency Union launched in EU in the post-WWII era. Namely, it covers Snakes, European Monetary System, and establishment of the Economic and Currency Union. Moreover, the paper analyzes the uniform monetary policy...

Assuming a production process with returns to scale that vary with the intensity it is operated at, an AK-model of endogenous growth with constant returns to scale in production is shown to arise due to replication driven by profit-maximization. If replication occurs at the efficiency-maximizing...

This study undertakes an examination of asymmetric adjustment effects between electricity consumption and economic growth in South Africa using quarterly data collected from 1983Q1 to 2013:Q4. In our study, we employ a momentum-threshold co-integration method to examine the long-run equilibrium...

The effect of aid on civil war has been widely debated. In this paper we introduce a new framework to evaluate the effectiveness of aid on conflict. Using proxies for the evolution of conflict we show that over the course of the conflict aid significantly affects the escalation and de-escalation...