The authors provide an empirical evaluation of the impact of infrastructure development on economic growth and income distribution using a large panel data set encompassing over 100 countries and spanning the years 1960-2000. The empirical strategy involves the estimation of simple equations for...

An adequate supply of infrastructure services has long been viewed by both academics and policy makers as a key ingredient for economic development. Sub-Saharan Africa ranks consistently at the bottom of all developing regions in terms of infrastructure performance, and an increasing number of...

Measured by the Gini coefficient, income inequality in Brazil rose from 0.57 in 1981 to 0.63 in 1989, before falling back to 0.56 in 2004. This latest figure would lower Brazil's world inequality rank from 2nd (in 1989) to 10th (in 2004). Poverty incidence also followed an inverted U-curve over...

This paper analyzes the impact of large-scale expansion of biofuels on the global income distribution and poverty. A global computable general equilibrium model is used to simulate the effects of the expansion of biofuels on resource allocation, commodity prices, factor prices and household...

The authors develop a microeconometric method to account for differences across distributions of household income. Going beyond the determination of earnings in labor markets, they also estimate statistical models for occupational choice and for conditional distributions of education, fertility,...

Mali, a landlocked West African nation at the southern edge of the Sahara Desert, has introduced a program to produce biodiesel using jatropha curcas, a non-edible shrub widely available throughout the country by farmers for generations as a living fence for their gardens. The aim of the program...