Within an overlapping generations model of economic growth, the paper asks how the existence of a fixed supply of land or housing, whose price is bid up by economic growth, affects the accumulation of productive capital along the balanced growth of the economy. Land rules out the Golden rule...

The main contribution of the paper is an attempt to address the selection and growth issues by working, not with cohorts of households, but with cohorts of individuals. The gain from doing so is that we dispose completely of selection associated with household formation, which compro-mises our...

Part I of this chapter briefly reviews the arguments for using consumption rather than income as a measure of living standards and for using it to measure poverty and inequality. It goes on to discuss the principal uses to which consumption data have been put; while the docu-mentation of living...

The World Bank prepares and publishes estimates of the number of poor people in the world. While everyone knows that these numbers should be taken with a pinch of salt, the numbers are arguably important. This paper discusses a number of problems with the current $1-a-day poverty counts, makes...

Although many governments in developing countries profess redistributive aims, and although standard efficiency arguments suggests that cash transfers are the best way of accomplishing such aims, direct cash transfers to the poor are rare. In this paper we examine a counter example, the "social...

I explore the connection between income inequality and health in both poor and rich countries. I discuss a range of mechanisms, including nonlinear income effects, credit restrictions, nutritional traps, public goods provision, and relative deprivation. I review the evidence on the effects of...

In this paper, I briefly review the literature on commodity prices as it touches on African economic development; fuller accounts are given in Gersovitz and Paxxon, Deaton and Miller and Collier and Gunning. In the next section, I provide some data that documents who exports what, and what has...