The literature suggests that in developing countries illness shocks at the household level can have a negative and severe impact on household income. Few studies have so fare examined the effects of mortality. The major difference between illness and mortality shocks is that a death of a...

Despite the recent and intense debate on how to define and measure pro-poor growth, there is one important issue which has so far not received sufficient attention: how applications of pro-poor growth measurements can appropriately take into account relative price changes, which, given the...

One of the most frequent critiques of the HDI is that is does not take into account inequality within countries. We suggest a relatively easy and intuitive approach which allows to compute the three components and the overall HDI for quintiles of the income distribution. This allows comparisons...

There is well-known debate about the respective role of geography versus institutions in explaining the long term development of countries. These debates have usually been based on cross country regressions where questions about parameter heterogeneity, unobserved heterogeneity, and endogeneity...

We propose a methodology for comparing poverty over multiple periods across time and space without arbitrarily aggregating income over various years or relying on arbitrarily specified poverty lines. Following Duclos et al. (2006a), we use the multivariate stochastic dominance methodology to...

This paper investigates the patterns of capital entry barriers into informal activities and capital returns in a number of Sub-Saharan African economies using a unique micro data set on informality covering seven West-African countries. Our assessment of initial investment of micro and small...

This paper offers a unified framework linking two important debates: First, the debate about the respective roles of geography and institutions on economic development; Second, the literature on the role of technological change and economic development on agricultural intensification and land...

In the middle of the nineties the rural population in Burkina Faso was seriously hit by rising food prices. Whereas cotton farmers were able to cope with this shock given the simultaneous boom in the cotton sector, food crop farmers had to withdraw children from school and to let them work more...