This chapter offers a primer on poverty, inequality, and vulnerability analysis and a guide to resources on this topic. It is written for decision makers who want to define the type of information they need to monitor poverty reduction and make appropriate policy decisions and for the technical...

This paper documents the impact of Argentina's recent economic crises on different aspects of poverty, with a special focus on the economic collapse of 2002. We discuss the methodology of poverty measurement in Argentina and we use a simple rule to compensate for the lack of regional poverty...

Relying on a Constant Relative Risk Aversion utility function, we use panel data for Argentina to compute risk-adjusted income and poverty measures and to analyze their determinants. Taking risk into account increases poverty. The regression analysis suggests that many household characteristics...

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...

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...

Assessing whether distributional changes are "pro-poor" has become increasingly widespread in academic and policy circles. Starting from relatively general ethical axioms, this paper proposes simple graphical methods to test whether distributional changes are indeed pro-poor. Pro-poor standards...

This paper shows how to take into account risk aversion when measuring poverty under income variability. An application to British panel data suggests that income and poverty comparisons between the self-employed and other groups of households are sensitive to assumptions on the degree of risk...

This paper extends familiar results on the optimal pricing of publicly provided goods and price cap regulations in a stochastic dominance framework. The key advantage is that the assessment as to whether pricing or price cap reforms are poverty reducing or welfare improving is not contingent on...

Apart from fiscal measures, another initiative taken by the government of Liberia to respond to the economic crisis consisted in the launch of a cash for work temporary employment program. This part of the study consists of three chapters devoted to the analysis of the program. First, in this...

To help households cope with the recent economic crisis, and especially the increase in food prices, the government of Liberia announced a number of fiscal measures. A first measure was to implement a temporary exoneration of import duties on food products, and especially imported rice. A second...