The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) are unlikely to be met by 2015, even if huge increases in development assistance materialize. The MDGs are a set of quantitative, time-bound targets for indicators such as poverty, education and mortality in developing countries adopted unanimously by the...

This paper focuses on key ways in which donors can improve the quality of foreign assistance and make it more effective in achieving the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). The paper makes three central arguments. First, donors should be much more goal and results oriented in their assistance...

We aim to clarify how objective wellbeing in Romania, as expressed by statistical indicators, evolved during two and a half decades (1990-2014). We considered three main pillars of welfare - health, income & consumption, education - and we investigated their evolution for five CEE countries:...

This paper develops a comprehensive measure of household economic well-being. The "sustainable consumption" concept accounts for income, assets, debt, transfer payments, and asset returns to estimate a consumption path that balances resources with expenditure over a household's lifetime....

During the 2000s, recurrent food price shocks due to volatility in international markets and extreme weather events affected consumption and nutritional patterns of Mexican urban households. This research quantifies the impacts of food price shocks on the purchase of nutrients and on the weight...

There are evidences that the actual global crisis affected the convergence process in EU. Generally, just new adhered countries were more affected by the actual crisis. Today all forecasts are suffering by uncertainty. Last time, economists, with their methods and models, are invoked for actual...

Objective: To estimate the treatment effect from participating in an asthma intervention that was part of the National Asthma Control Program. Study Setting: Data on children who participated in asthma case management (N=270) and eligible children who did not participate in case management...

In this article we extend the recent literature on overlapping generations with a pollution sector by allowing generations to have a certain pollution perception with regards to the stock of pollution. Pollution perception, assumed to be part of the generations' preferences, can be either a...

Defined benefit (DB) pensions and Social Security are two important resources for financing retirement in the United States. However, these illiquid, non-market forms of wealth are typically excluded from measures of net worth. To the extent that these broadly held resources substitute for...

Leveraging novel data on consumer credit and debit card spending by Zip code, this study examines how the impact of government transfers on economic well-being varied by household type during the COVID-19 pandemic. Our findings indicate that pandemic transfers disproportionately benefited...