It has recently been argued that the informal sector of labor markets in de- veloping economies shows a dual structure with part of the informal sector being competitive to the formal sector and part of the informal sector being the result of market segmentation. To test this hypothesis, we...

Households in developing countries are frequently hit by severe idiosyncratic and covariate shocks resulting in high consumption volatility. A household's currently observed poverty status might therefore not be a good indicator of the household's general poverty risk, or in other words its...

One of the most frequent critiques of the HDI is that is does not take into account inequality within countries in its three dimensions. We suggest a relatively easy and intuitive approach which allows to compute the three components and the overall HDI for quintiles of the income distribution....

We propose a new methodology for comparing poverty over multiple periods across time and space that does not arbitrarily aggregate income over various years or rely on arbitrarily specified poverty lines or poverty indices. Following Duclos et al. (2006a), we use the multivariate stochastic...

There is a well-known debate about the roles of geography versus institutions in explaining the long-term development of countries. These debates have usually been based on cross-country regressions where questions about parameter heterogeneity, unobserved heterogeneity, and endogeneity cannot...

The recent focus on 'pro-poor growth' led also to an intense debate on how exactly to define and to measure pro-poor growth. However, all suggested measures, irrespective whether they use the absolute or the relative definition of pro-poor growth have in common that they are based on the...

The literature shows that regional disparities in growth and poverty are often relatively high, that these regional disparities do not necessarily disappear as the economies grow and develop and that these disparities are itself in many cases an important driver of the overall performance of an...

In the middle of the nineties the rural population in Burkina Faso was seriously hit by rising food prices. Whereas cotton farmers were able to cope with this shock given the simultaneous boom in the cotton sector, food crop farmers had to withdraw children from school and to let them work more...

One of the most frequent critiques of the HDI is that it does not take into account inequality within countries in its three dimensions. We use a simple approach, which allows to compute the three components and the overall HDI for quintiles of the income distribution. This allows to compare the...