After the"adjustment decade"of the 1980s, attention in the 1990s seems to be turning once again to longer-term issues of development - particularly of poverty alleviation. Just as the 1980s were heralded by a series of reports on adjustment, so the 1990s have seen two major reports on poverty:...

Welfare economics develops the logic of how the gains of the gainers and the losses of the losers should be weighed against each other, in a specific ethical framework. Political economy develops the logic of how they will be weighed against each other, in the context of sociopolitical...

There has been much discussion recently of structuring tax and transfer programs to ensure that resources go to the poor, with minimal leaks to the nonpoor. The poor have no incentive to earn income with 100 percent marginal tax rates, but how high or low the marginal rate of taxation should be,...

This paper proposes an overlapping generations multi‐sector model of the labor market for developing countries with three heterogeneities – heterogeneity within self‐employment, heterogeneity in ability, and heterogeneity in age. We revisit an iconic paradox in a class of multi‐sector...

Should public investment be targeted to big cities or to small towns, if the objective is to minimize national poverty? To answer this policy question we extend the basic Todaro-type model of rural-urban migration to the case of migration from rural areas to two potential destinations, secondary...

In an economy with migration, poverty changes are composed of a number of forces, including the income gains and losses realized by the various migration streams. We present a simple but powerful decomposition methodology that uses panel data to measure the contributions of different migration...

This review is framed around the exploration of a central hypothesis: A shift in public investment towards secondary towns from big cities will improve poverty reduction performance. Of course the hypothesis raises many questions. What exactly is the dichotomy of secondary towns versus big...

Should public investment be targeted to big cities or to small towns, if the objective is to minimize national poverty? To answer this policy question we extend the basic Todaro-type model of rural-urban migration to the case of migration from rural areas to two potential destinations, secondary...