Economic growth and poverty reduction require for a country to establish efficient rules for economic and political transactions. Poor countries suffer from inadequate, inefficient transaction rules. Formal rules (e.g., laws, policies) must be nested in hospitable behavioural norms and values....

Fiscal policy measures are a key means by which governments can influence distribution and poverty, but in fact the relationships between fiscal policy and poverty are not well understood. The most commonly used technique for assessing the distributional impact, benefit incidence analysis, is...

Inequality has risen in many countries over the last two decades, especially in the transition economies, but also in many developing and developed economies. This is disturbing since little progress can be made in poverty reduction when inequality is high and rising. Moreover, contrary to...

Wie bewältigen Haushalte den wirtschaftlichen Wiederaufbau nach einem Krieg? Sind einige Gruppen ländlicher Haushalte in einer Armutsfalle gefangen, während andere der Armut entfliehen können? Diese Fragen werden hier am Beispiel von Mosambik diskutiert, wo kurz nach der Unabhängigkeit im...

Of the many labour market Hartz IV reforms that have been implemented in Germany since 2005, the role of short-term unemployment insurance has not received much attention. In this paper we examine distributional effects of labour earnings and unemployment benefits using simulated increases in...

This paper proposes a microeconomic decomposition of the evolution of income inequality in Côte d'Ivoire in the 1990s, allowing the in-depth analysis of simultaneous contributions of four types of phenomena to the evolution of the distribution of income: a change in the remuneration rates of...

Does more education really mean less poverty and less inequality? How much less? And what are the transmission mechanisms? This paper presents the results of a microsimulation exercise for the Brazilian State of Ceará, which suggests that broad-based policies aimed at increasing educational...