Using newly comprehensive data and tools from the Global Consumption and Income Project or CGIP, covering most of the world and five decades, we present a portrait of the changing global distribution of consumption and income and discuss its implications for our understanding of inequality,...

This paper investigates the impact of legalized prostitution on human trafficking inflows. According to economic theory, there are two opposing effects of unknown magnitude. The scale effect of legalizing prostitution leads to an expansion of the prostitution market, increasing human...

Starting from a representative welfare function, this paper developed a simple method to endogenously specify the weights for the Human Development Index (HDI), and finds that the current equal-weighted HDI significantly biases down the weight of life expectancy. The weights proposed by this...

While the majority of micro studies finds that rural education increases agricultural productivity, various recent cross-country regressions analysing the determinants of agricultural productivity were only able to detect insignificant or even surprising negative effects of schooling. In this...

Conventional approaches to the measurement of income-poverty require the ability to identify the poor by reference to a specified poverty line. On the face of it, it may appear to be unproblematic to specify such a poverty line. There are, however, analytical and conceptual difficulties entailed...

Using panel data from Indonesia, this paper analyzes the linkages between child nutrition, health care, household wealth and parental education in order to detect transmission channels between health, education, nutrition, water and sanitation access, five critical MDG targets. This paper...

Although empowerment is seen as intrinsically important and instrumentally valuable to escape poverty, there is very little research on the empirical drivers of empowerment. Using custom-made household-level information and using advanced econometric techniques that also correct for endogeneity,...

This paper asks whether income mobility in South Africa over the last decade has indeed been as impressive as currently thought. Using new national panel data (NIDS), substantial measurement error in reported income data is found, which is further corroborated by a provincial income data panel...

Most analysts of the modern Latin American economy hold to a pessimistic belief in historical persistence -- they believe that Latin America has always had very high levels of inequality, suggesting it will be hard for modern social policy to create a more egalitarian society. This paper argues...

This paper studies the impact of droughts on health outcomes and health expenditures in rural Vietnam. Given the increasing frequency of extreme weather events in Vietnam and many developing countries, it is crucial for policy makers to be aware of the economic impact of such shocks at the micro...