In the first empirical study on how financial reforms have been instrumental in mitigating inequality through financial sector competition, we contribute at the same time to the macroeconomic literature on measuring financial development and respond to the growing field of economic development...

The paper examines the appropriate domain of the Welfare State by exploring the areas in which free enterprise fails to provide adequate welfare state services. The paper outlines a simple coherent strategy for formulating government welfare state policy by identifying the relevant market...

This paper considers the distributional consequences of the reform programme in Russia. Although a small fraction of the population have gained under the reforms, average real household per capita income has declined significantly with households at the lower end of the income distribution...

Numerous authors have pointed out the importance of taking into consideration the intra-household distribution of resources in the analysis of poverty. Most empirical studies of poverty, however, assume an equal sharing of resources between all household members. There is a growing body of...

The paper proposes a simple framework for the evaluation of anti-poverty programs based on single means differences, FGT poverty measures and stochastic dominance theory. A Treatment Effect Curve (TEC) is derived and its use illustrated with simulated data.

The impact of trade openness on poverty has been in the limelight for a few decades now, since most developing countries relaxed their trade regimes. Poverty has always been a central issue for developing countries mainly because of their large vulnerable populations. In this paper, a panel of...

We study an innovative welfare program in Chile which combines a period of frequent home visits to households in extreme poverty, with guaranteed access to social services. Program impacts are identified using a regression discontinuity design, exploring the fact that program eligibility is a...

The paper develops a new approach to measuring the impact of government cash transfers on poverty alleviation that takes into account endogenous reactions and consumption smoothing of households. We use the methodology to study the impact of changes in government cash benefits on poverty rates...

In this paper we re-examine poverty among working class households in inter-war London using the newly computerized records from the New Survey of London Life and Labour (NSLLL), a survey of living standards in London undertaken in 1929–31. First, we examine how the use of different poverty...

In his third social survey of York carried out in 1950, Seebohm Rowntree reported a steep decline since 1936 of the percentage of households in poverty. He attributed the bulk of this decline to government welfare reforms enacted during and after the War. Some observers have been uneasy about...