Since the end of 2007, countries in Central Asia have been struck by two major consecutive shocks: the food and fuel price increase in 2007-08, and the global economic and financial crisis that began at the end of 2008. Households, both poor and not poor, are directly and adversely affected by...

Poverty indicators often disagree about whether a person is poor or not. Yet, when it comes to assessing whether a programme is successful in reaching the poor the dominant practice is to use an income poverty indicator. This paper investigates whether the choice of welfare indicator influences...

We review the origins of the dollar-a-day poverty line, discuss historical poverty and inequality trends, and forecast poverty rates until 2030 using a new fractional response approach. Three findings stand out. First, global poverty reduction since 1981 has been rapid but regional trends are...

Most rural households in Pakistan remain in a state of energy poverty. They use a variety of non-conventional energy sources, including traditional biomass (firewood, animal and plant waste), kerosene and even LPG. A specially designed Energy Poverty Survey (EPS), carried out in rural Pakistan...

This study assesses how child deprivation in Ontario compares to that of Ontario's population in general and that of children in eight European high-income countries (France, Germany, United Kingdom, Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark and Sweden). This research has been motivated by the...

Do remittances and social assistance have different impacts on household expenditure patterns While two separate strands of literature have looked at how social assistance or remittances have been spent, few studies have compared them directly. Using data from a nationally representative...

Forced migration, often resulting from violent conflict, imposes large economic costs on both sending and receiving countries, on those agencies that coordinate humanitarian services and most importantly upon the forced migrants themselves. Programs encouraging the return of refugees are...

This paper deals with the problem of selecting the unit of analysis in multidimensional poverty analyses, which is a central decision to take, both from academic and normative points of view. The paper compares the results of an individual-level Multidimensional Poverty Index for Chile,...

The paper tries to explore the rationale behind the complexities of energy poverty among different income groups in rural communities. We attempted to understand why rural rich, despite their relatively high purchasing power use energy sources which tend to categorize them as energy poor. Using...