In this paper, we examine the effect of migrants’ remittances on poverty and inequality. The survey data were collected in Morocco, in the rural areas of the region Souss-Massa-Draa. By applying an original approach, we estimate the counterfactual income of remittance-recipient households...

This article attempts to assess empirically the impact of remittances on household expenditure and relative poverty in Morocco. We apply propensity score matching methods to the 2006/2007 Moroccan Living Standards Measurement Survey. We find that migrants’ remittances can improve living...

Since the 1994 devaluation, growth has been quite strong in Mali (about 5% p.a. on average), but much weaker in terms of GDP per person (about 2.6% p.a.) due to a very high index of fecundity. Growth is still very unstable, due to a large share of agriculture in GDP and very sensitive to...

The objective of this report is to document China’s productivity performance since 1978 and determine its impact on poverty. The report finds that China has made substantial progress in economic development since economic reform started in 1978. Strong economic growth has been fuelled by rapid...

The United Nations has set as a goal for the world community the halving of the rate of poverty between 1990 and 2015. Previous literature and empirical work provides a strong consensus that growth reduces poverty, and several recent studies have also found that the higher is income inequality...

This paper develops an Index of Economic Well-being (IEWB) for the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, Germany, Norway and Sweden for the period 1980 to 2001 which recognizes four components: Current effective per capita consumption flows; Net societal accumulation of stocks of...

In this chapter, Lars Osberg and Andrew Sharpe provide an overview of trends in a number of dimensions of economic well-being (consumption flows, stocks of wealth, income equality, and economic security) from the lens of the Index of Economic Well-being, a new composite measure of economic...

This report presents the results of a number of simulations with the Social Policy Simulation Database and Model (SPSD/M) of National Child Benefit (NCB) rules, isolating the impact of these rules on low-income or poverty rates and gaps in Canada. According to the after-tax LICO, now the most...

Lars Osberg makes the case in his paper that the major success story of Canadian social policy in the twentieth century has in fact been the reduction of poverty among senior citizens. According to Osberg, the poverty rate, defined with the poverty line measured as one-half median equivalent...

The use of expenditure surveys to measure food insecurity is widely discussed. In this study, we investigate food insecurity in terms of monetary poverty. Using a Malian survey that incorporates exceptionally detailed information on food consumption, we estimate that 35 % of the households are...