Latin American countries are generally characterized as displaying high income and earnings inequality overall along with high inequality by gender, race, and ethnicity. However, the latter phenomenon is not a major contributor to the former phenomenon. Using household survey data from four...

This paper estimates the impact of registering for taxes on firm profits in Bolivia, the country with the highest levels of informality in Latin America. A new survey of micro and small firms enables the authors to control for a rich set of measures of owner ability and business motivations that...

With food prices on the rise, understanding the transmission of price shocks, both internationally and domestically, is central for trade policy analysis. This paper examines spatial market integration and its determinants for ten key food products in Bolivia, across the four most important...

Over the medium time horizon, skill upgrading, differentials in sectoral technological progress, and migration of labor out of farming activities are some of the major structural adjustment factors shaping the evolution of an economy and its connected poverty trends. The main focus of the...

Modifying the national poverty line to the context of observed consumption patterns of the poor is becoming popular. A context-specific poverty line would be more consistent with preferences. This paper provides theoretical and empirical evidence that the contrary holds and that the national...

With the recent release of the 2011 purchasing power parity (PPP) data from the International Comparison Program (ICP), analysts and institutions are confronted with the question of whether and how to use them for global poverty estimation. The previous round of PPP data from 2005 led to a large...

Recent National Sample Surveys point to significant poverty reduction in India since 2004/05, with a marked acceleration between 2009/10 and 2011/12. This paper enquires into important aspects of income mobility between 2004/05 and 2011/12, based on new statistical methods to convert the three...

Macro- and micro-economic evidence suggests a positive role of remittances in preparing households against natural disasters and in coping with the loss afterwards. Analysis of cross-country macroeconomic data shows that remittances increase in the aftermath of natural disasters in countries...

In 1993, in response to persistent unemployment, and rising poverty and social unrest, the government of Albania introduced an anti-poverty program, namely Ndihma Ekonomike; in 1995 it was extended to all poor households. This paper estimates the separate effects of participation in this income...

This paper identifies and estimates the strength of the reduction in poverty linked to improved opportunities for women in the expanding maquila sector. A simulation exercise shows that, at a given point in time, poverty in Honduras would have been 1.5 percentage points higher had the maquila...