The paper examines the level and sources of vulnerability in rural Bangladesh using a household survey. We use a simple two-level random intercept model to estimate expected mean and variance in consumption as well as to decompose the variance into idiosyncratic and covariate components. Our...

This study estimates ex ante poverty and vulnerability of households in Bangladesh using Household Income and Expenditure Survey (HIES) data in 2005. Our results show that poverty is not same as vulnerability as a substantial share of those currently above the poverty line is highly vulnerable...

A growing concern on widening income gap between the rich and the poor, the policy mismatch in tackling the relative poverty and income inequality have invited increasing volumes of research focusing on the nexus between equity and efficient growth. Developed countries have experienced the...

In this paper, we use consumption dominance curves, a tool developed by Makdissi and Wodon (2002) in order to assess the redistributive impact of electricity subsidies in Guinea. The data in the 'Enquête Intégrée de Base pour l'Évaluation de la Pauvreté (EIBEP) 2002-2003’ show that...

This paper focuses on the importance data issues to the analysis of growth, poverty and economic inequality. We introduce a number of major databases frequently used in applied research on growth, poverty and global and international inequality. A discussion of data quality, data consistency,...

We propose simple graphical methods to identify poverty-reducing marginal reforms of transfer programs. The methods are based on Program Dominance curves that display cumulative program benefits weighted by powers of poverty gaps. These curves can be decomposed simply as sums of targeting...

Throughout this article, we utilize consumption dominance curves, a tool developed by Makdissi and Wodon (2002) to analyze the impacts on poverty brought on by changes in the food subsidy system in Egypt. The Egypt Integrated Household Survey (EIHS) of 1997 allows us to conclude that changes...

The poverty impact of indirect tax reforms is analyzed using sequential stochastic dominance methods. This allows agents to differ in dimensions that cannot always be precisely captured within the usual money-metric indicators of living standards. Examples of such dimensions include household...

This paper proposes a new methodology to test for whether indirect tax reforms are pro-poor. The methodology extends stochastic dominance techniques and enables identifying tax reforms that will necessarily be deemed absolutely or relatively pro-poor by a wide spectrum of poverty analysts. The...

The targeting efficiency and the coverage of social programs for the poor are typically analyzed by partitioning the total population in four mutually exclusive groups: the poor who benefit from a program or policy, the poor who do not benefit, the non-poor who benefit, and the non-poor who do...