This paper investigates whether public investments that led to improvements in road quality and increased access to agricultural extension services led to faster consumption growth and lower rates of poverty in rural Ethiopia. Using a Generalized Methods of Moments . Instrumental Variables....

This study examines the consequences of alternative relief and development interventions on the well being of households in rural Zimbabwe. It does so by: a) establishing a framework that links household resources to levels of poverty; b) validating the quantitative data with group wealth...

This paper examines income dynamics for a panel of households resettled on former white-owned farms in the aftermath of Zimbabwe's independence. There are four core findings: (i) there has been an impressive accumulation of assets by these households; (ii) while this accumulation has played a...

What keeps some people persistently poor, even in the context of relative high growth? In this paper, we explore this question using a 15-year longitudinal data set from Ethiopia. We compare the findings of an empirical growth model with those derived from a model of the determinants of chronic...

We introduce a new ‘supply-push’ instrument for foreign aid, to be used together with an instrumental variable estimator that filters out interactive fixed effects. We use this instrument to study the effects of aid on macroeconomic ratios, and especially the ratios of consumption,...

The present study employs recent World Bank data to shed light, in a global context, on the transformation of income and inequality changes to poverty reduction for a large number of countries in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). The study begins by shedding light on SSA’s progress on poverty. Next,...

Job creation is a central part of the policy of almost all African countries. The problems are particularly acute in Nigeria where over the period of the early 2000s there was a substantial decline in the number of private wage jobs. While policy discussion focuses on the extent of unemployment...

Using data from a randomized control trial in Sri Lanka, this paper explores whether cash and in-kind grants helped microenterprises approach the productivity level of SMEs. The paper first estimates production functions and subsequently treatment effects on TFP levels. Most significantly, more...