The causes of poverty in rural China have been explained in a variety of ways. These explanations include poor natural endowments, a high dependency ratio and inadequate capital and education. These explanations are examined using a unique set of survey data.

Income is one measure of material well-being. But do the people with the lowest income also work the longest hours? Are they also malnuourished and unable to read? Do social isolation and ill-health compound the hardships of low income? On the evidence presented in this paper the answer for poor...

Measures of standard of living and of poverty are plagued by the obvious gap between the relative simplicity of the indices and the infinite complexity of what they are trying to capture. Some trade-off between the simplicity desirable in an index, and real-life complexity is inevitable. The...

Our starting point is to re-examine the concept of poverty, in particular its ethical dimensions, in order to understand more clearly exactly what poverty lines are intended to capture. Our concern with poverty lines is twofold. First, they are not credible measures of poverty, because they...

This paper examines wage differentials between public sector and private sector workers in Australia. After controlling for observed characteristics and individual fixed effects, we show that on average workers in the public sector earn about 5.1% percent more hourly wages than those in the...