This paper uses data from eight different consumption questionnaires randomly assigned to 4,000 households in Tanzania to obtain evidence on the nature of measurement errors in estimates of household consumption. While there are no validation data, the design of one questionnaire and the...

Minimum wages are generally thought to be unenforceable in developing rural economies. But there is one solution - a workfare scheme in which the government acts as the employer of last resort. Is this a cost-effective policy against poverty? Using a microeconometric model of the casual labor...

In public-private partnership transactions in the water sector, one of the alleged concerns is that there is little market competition at the auction stage. This paper casts light on a tradeoff between the competition effect at the auction level and potential economies of scale in service...

The results of this paper challenge the conventional wisdom in the literature that productivity plays no role in the economic development of Singapore. Properly accounting for market power and returns to scale technology, the estimated average productivity growth is twice as large as the...

In 1995 the Mexican government initiated structural reform of the natural gas sector-reform that permitted private investment in transportation, storage, distribution, trade and marketing while maintaining a State monopoly in production. It prepared a detailed regulatory framework to implement...

With farms cultivating tens or hundreds of thousands of hectares, Ukraine is often used to demonstrate the existence of economies of scale in modern grain production. Panel data analysis for all the country's farms with more than 200 hectares in 2001-2011 suggests that higher yields and profits...

The theory and evidence supporting a relativist approach to poverty measurement are critically reviewed. Various sources of welfare interdependence are identified, including the idea of "relative deprivation" as well other (positive and negative) welfare effects for poor people of belonging to a...

The authors report new estimates of measures of absolute poverty for the developing world over 1981-2004. A clear trend decline in the percentage of people who are absolutely poor is evident, although with uneven progress across regions. They find more mixed success in reducing the total number...

Following the endorsement of the Millennium Development Goals, there is an increasing demand for methods to track poverty regularly. This paper develops an economically intuitive and inexpensive methodology to do so in the absence of regular, comparable data on household consumption. The minimum...

Poverty reduction has become a fundamental objective of development, and therefore a metric for assessing the effectiveness of various interventions. Economic growth can be a powerful instrument of income poverty reduction. This creates a need for meaningful ways of assessing the poverty impact...