This article proposes graphical methods to determine whether commodity tax changes are "socially improving," in the sense of improving social welfare or decreasing poverty for large classes of social welfare and poverty indices. It also shows how estimators of critical poverty lines and economic...

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...

Evaluation of the poverty impact and targeting performance of a given social program may depend on how other programs are treated in the analysis. Using well-known results from cooperative game theory, this paper proposes an empirically simple yet theoretically sound method for allocating...

Using an extension of Lucas¡¯ model of endogenous growth with education externality, we show that an environmental tax may increase growth. This is because the tax makes physical capital accumulation less attractive, thereby correcting for the underinvestment by agents in human capital.

Under price ceilings and quality floors for agricultural inputs in cash crop sectors in developing countries where credit markets are weak, imperfect information on the ability of farmers to pay for their inputs at the end of the cropping season may lead the decentralized production of those...