Does clientelism perpetuate the weak state capacity that characterizes many young democracies? Prior work explains that clientelist parties skew public spending to private goods and under-supply public goods. Building on these insights, this article argues that clientelism creates a bureaucratic...

The degree of choice households have over their consumption expenditure is critical in deciding their economic class. Applying our measure to Egyptian household budget surveys, we estimate the population size of the middle class in Egypt and assess their well-being in the period 1995-2011. Our...

Limited attention has been paid to how well social mobility measures debated and used to study industrial countries perform in analysis of low-income settings. Following brief, selective reviews of the axiomatic and econometric literatures, three mobility concepts illustrate how properties that...

This paper discusses current methods for measuring and analysing occupational mobility, and the way in which methods designed for the analysis of developing countries may need to be modified when applied in other contexts. The paper discusses particular features of some developing societies,...

This study explores the relationship between household poverty and depth of informality by proposing a new measure of informality at the household level. It is defined as the share of activities (hours worked or income earned) without social insurance for wage workers in the household. We apply...

This paper seeks to understand whether the way in which inequality is communicated through measurements influences individuals' fairness perceptions regarding wealth inequality. It begins from the premise that prominent measures of inequality, such as the Gini coefficient, fall short of...

The analysis of poverty dynamics yields important insights about the expected effectiveness of alternative social policies on poverty reduction. This paper analyses the effect of spell recurrence on poverty dynamics taking into account multiple poverty and non-poverty spells. Using longitudinal...