We recently introduced a general method for measuring poverty when there are multiple dimensions [1,2] and provided a specific cross-country implementation (the MPI) as part of the 2010 Human Development Report [4,11] to complement existing methods. Our recent piece in the Journal of Economic...

Standard models explain urbanization by rural-urban migration in response to an (expected) urban-rural wage gap. The Green Revolution and rural poverty constitute rural push factors of migration. The Indus- trial Revolution and the urban bias are urban pull factors. This paper offers an...

This paper examines the impact and potential interactions of health, education and consumption dimensions of persistent poverty at the household level. Our application is to indictors of assets, undernutrition, and illiteracy drawn from the Ethiopia Rural Household Survey (ERHS) panel data set....

We introduce new approaches to research on poverty traps, focusing on changes in patterns of equilibria over time and across regions, applied to the Ethiopia Rural Household Survey. We revisit the incidence of multiple equilibria using new nonparametric techniques; we also emphasize conditions...

This paper uses household panel data to provide robust evidence on the effects of BRAC’s Targeting the Ultra-poor Program in Bangladesh. Our identification strategy exploits type-1 errors in assignment, comparing households correctly included with those incorrectly excluded, according to...

Many governments provide monetary transfers to low-income families. The mechanism through which these subsidies are distributed may contain several inefficiencies that diminish the net-value obtained by the recipients. In this paper, we build and estimate a behavioral dynamic model that allows...

The world is becoming more and more urbanized at every income level, and there has been a dramatic increase in the number of mega-cities in the developing world. This has led scholars to believe that development and urbanization are not always correlated, either across space or over time. In...

The Foster, Greer, Thorbecke (1984) class nests several of the most widely used mea- sures in theoretical and empirical work on economic poverty. Use of this general class of measures, however, presupposes a dimension of well-being that, like income, is cardinally measurable. Responding to...

What is the impact of modern transportation technology on economic change in poor countries? Rail construction in colonial Africa provides a natu-ral experiment. Using new data on railroads and cities over one century within one country, Ghana, and Africa as a whole, we ï¬nd large permanent...

Multidimensional measures provide an alternative lens through which poverty may be viewed and understood. In recent work we have attempted to offer a practical approach to identifying the poor and measuring aggregate poverty (Alkire and Foster 2011). As this is quite a departure from traditional...