Various development objectives are worthy, but to my mind, one objective dominates all others: reducing the scourge of absolute economic misery in the world. In this paper, I focus on an important but relatively underemphasized approach to poverty reduction: helping the poor earn more in the...

This paper delves into the relationship between child nutritional outcome and (multiple) female work status in Nigeria from a micro perspective. The child nutritional outcome is proxied by child weight-for-age. Female work includes wage employment outside the household, household on-farm...

We use a gendered computable general equilibrium model to assess the implications of biofuels expansion in Mozambique. We compare scenarios with different gender employment intensities in producing jatropha for biodiesel. Under all scenarios, biofuels accelerate GDP growth and reduce poverty....

Behavioural economics highlights the role of social preferences in economic decisions. Further, populations are heterogeneous; suggesting that group composition may impact the ability to sustain voluntary public goods contributions. This parallels research in public economics where...

Declining social and economic inequalities since the late 1990s coincided with several basic shifts in Latin America's political landscape, including an electoral turn to the left and a revival of social mobilization from below. These shifts helped to 'repoliticize' inequality and return...

In order to understand whether a reduction in overall poverty has improved the situations of the poorest, it is crucial to distinguish them from the moderately poor population. In this paper, we explore the mechanisms to distinguish subsets of the poor in a multidimensional counting framework....

This paper examines the impacts of the financial, food and fuel crises on the livelihoods of low-income households Nigeria. It uses primary household level data from Nigeria to analyse the impacts of induced price variability on household welfare. Our results indicate that aggregate shocks have...

This paper offers a medium-term perspective for analysing the trade openness - inequality relationship in Latin America. We present three contributions. The first is that we assemble a database on income distribution indicators systematically estimated from household surveys with emphasis on...

Using an audit experiment carried out on of India’s largest real estate websites, we document striking variations between landlords' treatment of upper-caste Hindus, Other Backward Castes, Scheduled Castes, and Muslims. We find strong evidence of discrimination against Muslim applicants, both...

We contribute to the literature on trends in living standards in Tanzania by analysing child welfare using two multi-dimensional approaches, first-order dominance (FOD) and Alkire-Foster (AF). Between 1991/92 and 2010, remarkably similar area rankings emerge that suggest a widening gap between...