Despite impressive success in improving living conditions in many Caribbean countries, poverty still persists throughout the region. This study seeks to improve our understanding of poverty in the Caribbean and the current efforts to address it. It analyzes the causes and characteristics of...

This study uses the Viet Nam Living Standards Survey of 1992-93 to examine the association between household living standards and the level of access to various infrastructural services.

The alleviation of poverty has been the prime objective of small-scale targeted credit programs such as the Grameen Bank of Bangladesh. Based on household survey data, this paper concludes that these programs can play an important role in both lesing poverty and sustaining household welfare on a...

La structure de la repartition du niveau de vie su sein d'une population donnee est le cheval de bataille analytique de toute evaluation sociale. Dans une optique de choix collectifs, une telle repartition sert d'indicateur de l'etat social. En general, on presente une repartition d'un...

This report presents an update of poverty and income distribution statistics in Latin America and the Caribbean and examines the trends in these statistics during the 1980s. The document also provides a series of nonmonetary social indicators to help complete the profile of living conditions in...

The quantitative and qualitative approaches to poverty measurement and analysis have often been treated by practitioners as two distinct--even opposing--approaches. This paper highlights the key characteristics of the two approaches, examines the strengths and weaknesses of each, and analyzes...

A poverty line helps focus the attention of governments and civil society on the living conditions of the poor. In practice, there is typically not one monetary poverty line but many, reflecting the fact that poverty lines serve two distinct role. One role is to determine what the minimum level...

This paper is concerned with the derivation of a welfare indicator for households from consumption data. It examines, illustrating with reference to data for ecuador, several of the steps involved in contructing consumption aggregates and highlights some of the principles which should guide the...

much new work has been devoted to deriving and extending decomposable inequality and poverty measures which bridge the gap between description and analysis by throwing light on the processes undergirding inquality and poverty. For example, an application that has obvious policy relevance in the...