The World Development Report (WDR) has become such a fixture that it is easy to forget the circumstances under which it was born and the Bank's motivation for producing such a report at that time. In the first chapter of this essay, the authors provide a brief background on the circumstances of...

An analyst using household survey data to construct a welfare metric is often confronted with onfronted with An analyst using household survey data to construct a welfare metric is often confronted with a number of theoretical and practical problems. What components should be included in the...

Standard methods of measuring poverty assume that an individual is poor if he or she lives in a family whose income or consumption lies below an appropriate poverty line. Such methods provide only limited insight into male and female poverty separately. Nevertheless, there are reasons why...