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...

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...

While undernutrition among children is very pervasive both in Sub- Saharan Africa and South Asia, child mortality is rather low in South Asia. In contrast to that Sub-Saharan African countries suer by far the worst from high rates of child mortality. This dierent pattern of child mortality and...

In order to track progress in MDG1 and explicitly link growth, inequality, and poverty reduction, several measures of \"pro-poor growth\" have been proposed in the literature and used in applied academic and policy work. These measures, particularly the ones derived from the growth incidence...

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....

Children living in HIV/AIDS affected households bear the heaviest burden of the epidemic. Besides direct vertical transmission, HIV/ AIDS potentially worsens the children’s welfare indirectly through its socio-economic impact. This paper uses household survey data including information about...

In order to track progress on MDG1 and explicitly link growth, inequality, and poverty reduction, several measures of ’pro-poor growth’ have been proposed in the literature and used in applied academic and policy work. These measures, particularly the ones derived from the growth incidence...