With serious impacts of climate change looming in a few decades, but current poverty still high in the developing world, we ask how to spend development aid earmarked for the poor. Poverty reduction tends to be strongly linked to economic growth, but growth impacts the environment and increases...

Standard poverty analysis makes statements about deprivation after the veil of uncertainty has been lifted. Nonetheless, the term 'vulnerability' has been used as a tool to remark that uncertainty and risk do matter. In this paper, we define 'vulnerability to poverty' as the magnitude of the...

This paper uses a 13-year panel of individuals in Tanzania to assess how adult mortality shocks affect both short and long-run consumption growth of surviving household members. Using unique data which tracks individuals from 1991 to 2004, we examine consumption growth, controlling for a set of...

We explore how to measure poverty over time, by focusing on trajectories of poverty rather than poverty at a particular point in time. We consider welfare outcomes over a period in time, consisting of a number of spells. We offer a characterization of desirable properties for measuring poverty...

In many developing countries, the beneficiaries of transfer programmes are determined by community-based processes, based on some general targeting rules related to needs. This opens the door for local social and political processes to impact on who gets access. Despite increasingly large scale...

In many rural settings, informal mutual support networks have evolved into semiformal insurance groups, such as funeral societies. Using detailed panel data for six villages in Ethiopia, we can distinguish two types of contracts, in terms of whether payments are only made at the time of death or...

This paper provides evidence from one of the poorest countries of the world that the institutions of property rights, in particular related to land, are of crucial importance for investment and growth. In Ethiopia , with all land state-owned, the threat of land redistribution never appears far...

This paper analyses whether agricultural information flows give rise to social learning effects in banana cultivation in Nyakatoke, a small Tanzanian village. Based on a village census, full information is available on socio-economic characteristics and banana production of farmer kinship...