The past 30 years have seen a consistent increase in agricultural commercialization in rural Viet Nam, at the same time when rural residents have moved increasingly into non-agricultural activities. The contribution of the latter to welfare improvement and poverty reduction is well known; in...

While many studies of welfare dynamics have been conducted using panel data sets with two or three waves, much richer insights can be obtained where more waves are available. This paper analyses this issue for the case of the Viet Nam Access to Resources Household Survey, a carefully collected...

A key policy problem in most developing countries is the size of the informal sector and its persistence over time. In need to increase their tax revenues, policy makers face a trade-off between decreasing tax rates (making formalizing potentially more attractive) and alternatively raising tax...

The vast majority of households in rural Viet Nam undertake agricultural activities and for many this is their main livelihood. Moreover, this agriculture has become increasingly commercialized over time. This paper uses the five wave VARHS balanced panel data set to analyse three aspects of...

Ghana is relatively rare among Sub-Saharan African countries in having had sustained positive growth every year since the mid-1980s. This paper analyses the nature of the growth and then presents an analysis of the evolution of both consumption poverty and non-monetary poverty outcomes over this...

After many years of relatively slow growth, Tanzania's national accounts data report accelerated aggregate growth since around 2000. Our analysis shows that there has been somewhat slower growth in private consumption and in sectors such as agriculture in which most of the poor work and live....

This paper analyses the evolution of consumption poverty in Rwanda between 2001/1 and 2010/11, using three comparable good quality household surveys analysed along with detailed price data. Rwanda achieved impressive growth over this period. The first half of the 2000s was associated with slow...

Agriculture and food cultivation production remains a key sector in the Vietnamese economy in terms of productive activities, income generation, and national export earnings. Higher world market prices should therefore in principle have a beneficial impact on rural farmers. This is based however...

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the growth performance of the Cameroonian economy from independence in 1960 to date, and then to use this as a background for the analysis of poverty, inequality, and non-monetary outcomes. The analysis of poverty and inequality uses the microeconomic data...

Burkina Faso has experienced quite significant aggregate growth over the past two decades, but that growth has not been transformed into poverty reduction. The key obstacles preventing large-scale escape from poverty are very high population growth combined with the absence of major...