With Lao PDR's macroeconomic performance currently booming, we investigate the country's poverty situation by examining the drivers of household poverty. This paper tests four major hypotheses: (1) Whether higher returns on all crops harvested per capita reduce consumption expenditure, food...

The present study seeks to build on earlier work by identifying the factors associated with the frequency of natural disasters and the resulting mortality. Drawing together the main findings, some observations are made from a policy perspective to focus on key elements of a disaster reduction...

This paper examines the extent to which changes in global agricultural commodity price are transmitted to domestic prices in India and China. The focus is on short and medium-run adjustment processes using an error correction specification. In particular, we show that the extent of adjustment in...

Based on cross-country datasets, we find that (i) development of the rural agricultural sector is the most poverty reducing; (ii) rural non-agricultural sector also is poverty reducing in some cases, but its magnitude is much smaller than that associated with the rural agricultural sector; and...

Drawing upon a cross-country panel data for developing countries, the present study sheds new empirical light on dynamic and long-term linkages among growth, inequality and poverty. First, agricultural sector growth is found to be consistently the most important factor in reducing inequality and...

Drawing upon panel data estimations, we have analysed the relationships among agricultural productivity, employment, technology, openness of the economy, inequality in land distribution and poverty. First, we have identified a number of important factors affecting agricultural productivity, such...

The present study examines how and why ethnic minorities are poorer than ethnic majorities in Vietnam using the VHLSS data for 2002 and 2004. First, the analysis confirms that households belonging to the ethnic minority groups are not only poorer but also more vulnerable to various shocks than...

Over time, while some countries have experienced trends of poverty and inequality moving in the same direction, others have witnessed the two developmental issues panning out in opposite directions. The latter is observed in Ghana, where in the last two decades poverty has been reducing and...

This paper assesses causal effects of formal microcredit on children's educational outcomes by using household panel data (2000 and 2004) in a poor province of northwest rural China. The unobservables between borrowers and non-borrowers are controlled in static and dynamic...

India has one of the highest underweight burdens in the world, with signs of rising obesity. Coexistence of underweight and overweight women is symptomatic of the double burden of malnutrition. The present study aims to throw new light on the double burden of malnutrition among Indian women in...