In 2002 Malawi experienced a serious shortage of cereals due to adverse climatic conditions. The World Food Programme assumed that about 2.1 to 3.2 million people were threatened of starvation at that time. However, not much research has been undertaken to investigate the actual consequences of...

One of the most frequent critiques of the HDI is that is does not take into account inequality within countries in its three dimensions. In this paper, we apply a simply approach to compute the three components and the overall HDI for quintiles of the income distribution. This allows a...

Empirical evidence suggests that regional disparities in incomes are often very high, that these disparities do not necessarily disappear as economies grow and that these disparities are itself an important driver of growth. We use a novel approach based on multilevel modeling to decompose the...

The informal sector is typically characterised as being very heterogeneous and possibly composed of two clearly distinct segments, sometimes called the lower and upper tier. However, empirical evidence shows that even among lower tier entrepreneurs profitability can be quite high. We combine...

In low and middle income countries road traffic accident fatalities will become in the near future one of the three major causes of death. Given that in particular the active population accounts for these fatalities, the potential economic implications are large, on the micro and the macro...

There is a well-known debate about the respective roles 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...

One of the most frequent critiques of the HDI is that is does not take into account inequality within countries in its three dimensions. In this paper, we apply a simply approach to compute the three components and the overall HDI for quintiles of the income distribution. This allows a...

In 2002 Malawi experienced a serious shortage of cereals due to adverse climatic conditions. The World Food Programme assumed that about 2.1 to 3.2 million people were threatened of starvation at that time. However, not much research has been undertaken to investigate the actual consequences of...

I analyze the impact of food price inflation on parental decisions to send their children to school.* Moreover, I use the fact that food crop farmers and cotton farmers were exposed differently to that shock to estimate the income elasticity of school enrolment. The results suggest that the...

Empirical evidence suggests that regional disparities in incomes are often very high, that these disparities do not necessarily disappear as economies grow and that these disparities are itself an important driver of growth. We use a novel approach based on multilevel modeling to decompose the...