Benefit incidence analysis is an extremely popular tool to assess the distribution of benefits from government expenditure in developing countries, particularly in the social sectors. The analysis describes the welfare impact of public spending on groups of people or households, typically along...

We document a U-shaped relationship between income inequality and carbon dioxide emissions per capita, using a newly available panel data set on income inequality (GINI) with observations for 138 countries over the period 1960-2008. Our findings suggest that, for high-income countries with high...

This paper looks at household consumption and financial decisions made in a matrilineal society where women are traditionally the household financial managers. This culture was strongly altered by the British in the mid-19th century through Christian missionaries who proclaimed that the role of...

Electricity markets have typically been regulated all over the world. In Europe, UK and Norway have begun to deregulate their electricity markets. Several more countries will probably join them in the near future, for example Finland, Sweden and Spain. The objectives are twofold: to increase...

The welfare effects of introducing taxes on emissions of carbon dioxide is analysed within an empirical general equilibrium model of the Norwegian economy. A CO2 tax regime where we aim at stabilising the CO2 emissions at the 1990 emission level in 2020 is compared to a reference scenario...

Income-based as well as most existing multidimensional poverty indices (MPI) assume equal distribution within the household and thus are likely to lead to yield a biased assessment of individual poverty, and poverty by age or gender. In this paper we first show that the direction of the bias...

Pro-poor growth has been identified as one of the most promising pathways to accelerate poverty reduction in developing countries. The diagnostic pro-poor growth toolbox has so far focused on the income dimension as well as key non-income achievements in education and health. This article...

In this paper, we propose to use the so-called Sen-Shorrocks poverty index (Shorrocks, 1995) to measure multidimensional deprivation when only dichotomous variables are available to assess deprivation in the various deprivation domains, the most common case in the literature, and introduce a...

The 2007/2008 food price crisis and the following global economic recession has (temporarily) increased the number of people to suffer from hunger. While the impacts can be measured with precision only ex post, for policy makers it is critical to get a sense of likely impacts ex ante in order to...

This paper empirically investigates the role of nurture for the frequently reported differences in financial knowledge between women and men and uses a quasi-experimental framework comparing individuals who live in a matrilineal with those in a patriarchal environment in India. The results of...