Until now, the dominant belief concerning the relationship between poverty and risk aversion is that the poor are more risk averse. If the poor are more risk averse, then they will choose "low risk–low return" activities that trap them in poverty. However, both empirical and experimental...

Computing the tax-benefit position of similar "typical" households across countries is a method widely used in comparative fiscal- and social policy research. These calculations provide convenient summary pictures of certain aspects of tax-benefit systems. They can, however, be seriously...

This study is based on primary data collected from randomly chosen 182 households inhabiting seven sample villages in the Udalguri subdivision, Assam (india). It indicates that at least 35.85 percent of the population (and 33.52 percent of households) in the sample villages is below poverty line...

This paper studies poverty as a dynamic phenomenon, motivated by the recurring economic crises that affect developing countries and the incidence of income fluctuations on household welfare. While the increasing availability of household panel data has been exploited in theoretical analysis and...

This paper is concerned with concepts – poverty, inequality, affluence, and polarization – that are typically treated in different literatures. Our aim here is to place them within a common framework and to identify the way in which different classes of income transfers contribute to...

In this paper we report our findings as to the extent of poverty among the casual labourers of Shillong, the capital city of Meghalaya, India. Two views of poverty have been considered; first at the per capita (per month) income level and the second at the nutritional level. Nutritional level has...

This note is motivated by recent arguments made by Martin Feldstein in which the relevance of inequality is dismissed (if everybody's income goes up, who cares if inequality is up too?), and the argument is made that only poverty alleviation should matter. This note shows that we all do care...