"This paper proposes that individuals care about the relative income of proximate reference groups. Making use of self-reported life satisfaction as a proxy for unobservable utility, the relative income of siblings is tested for relevance as a reference point for new sample data from Venezuela....

"Formal and informal commercial sex work is a way of life for many poor women in developing countries. Though sex workers have long been identified as crucial in affecting the spread of HIV/AIDS, particularly in Sub-Saharan Africa, the nature of sex-for-money transactions remains poorly...

"This paper explores how the elimination of Madagascar's Marketing Board in 1995 affected prices paid to farmers, incentives, and regional indicators of poverty and inequality. After steadily losing market share, Madagascar has been able to regain some of the lost ground since the mid-1990s....

This is an internal status report to ESMAP and Gesellschaft fur Technische Zusammenarbeit (GTZ) which summarizes their ongoing work under a joint energy study entitled INGENS - Income Generation through Energy and. Complementary Services. INGENS has proposed (and started to test) a pragmatic,...

"Systematic information on household financial asset holdings in developing countries is very sparse. The author reviews some available data and current policy debates. Although financial asset holdings by households are highly concentrated, deeper financial systems are correlated with improved...

How can the world grow more food, increase incomes, reduce poverty, and protect the environment with growing numbers of mouths to feed and increasingly constrained resources? A big part of the answer lies in better management of agricultural water. Agricultural water management (AWM) encompasses...