In light of research that has argued that the income elasticity of nutrition is low, the goal of a new generation of cash transfer programmes to boost the nutrition of poor families' children may seem surprising. This observation applies especially to South Africa's unconditional Child Support...

The emphasis on growth has led to an under-emphasis of the micro-impacts of macro-economic policies. Whether growth reduces income-poverty is crucially dependent on its impact on employment. This paper addresses the question: what kind of productive employment can an economy generate that...

The main objective of this study is to compute an international poverty threshold based on the food requirement to ensure an adequate calorie intake for the world?s poorest. The study proposes a new methodology based on consumer theory to provide a caloric based international poverty threshold....

This paper examines the trend in post-Apartheid earnings inequality in South Africa. By combining data sets, the paper is able to analyze the trend for the whole period 1995-2004. Earnings inequality rose sharply during 1995-1999 and then declined marginally, but remained high, during 2000-2004....

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he measurement of per capita daily expenditures relative to a monetary poverty line, also known as ?sophisticated means testing?, is the most widely used approach to poverty assessment. However, it is reliant on the implementation of time- and cost-intensive household surveys. Hence, for...

This paper proposes a new ?Pro-Poor Policy (PPP)? index, which measures the pro-poorness of government programmes, as well as basic service delivery in education, health and infrastructure. The index provides a means to assess the targeting efficiency of government programmes compared to perfect...

We argue that inter-country comparisons of income poverty based on poverty lines uniformly reflecting the costs of the basic requirements of human beings are superior to the existing money-metric approaches. In this exercise, we implement a uniform approach to poverty assessment based on basic...

This Working Paper investigates how estimates of the extent and trend of consumption poverty in China between 1990 and 2001 vary as a result of alternative plausible assumptions concerning the poverty line and estimated levels of consumption. The exercise is motivated by the existence of...

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