This paper has an empirical and overtly methodological goal. The authors propose and defend a method for estimating the effect of household economic status on educational outcomes without direct survey information on income or expenditures. They construct an index based on indicators of...

The cost of public investment is not the value of public capital. Unlike for private investors, there is no remotely plausible behavioral model of the government as investor that suggests that every dollar the public sector spends as"investment"creates capital in an economic sense. This...

The author presents theory and calculations to show that part of the explanation of slow growth in many poor countries is not that governments did not spend on investment, but that these investments did not create productive capital. For a variety of reasons governments take resources from...

Imagine several mountain climbers, scaling a cliff face, who want protection from falling. One way to protect them would be to place a net at the bottom of the cliff to catch any climber just before he hits the ground. Another would be to provide a rope, and a set of movable devices that can be...

Poverty is intrinsically a complex social construct, and even when it is narrowly defined by a deficit of consumption spending, many thorny issues arise in setting an appropriate"poverty line". The authors limit themselves to examining how poverty - defined on a consistent, welfare-comparable...

Vulnerability is an important aspect of households'experience of poverty. Many households, while not currently in poverty, recognize that they are vulnerable to events - a bad harvest, a lost job, an illness, and unexpected expense, an economic downturn - that could easily push them into...

Indonesia's economic crisis has caused a consumption expenditures deterioration in the welfare of Indonesians. Focusing on only one dimension of individual, and family welfare - consumption expenditures - the authors analyze two issues associated with the measurement of poverty. The first issue...

The authors construct a measure of"social capital"in rural Tanzania, using data from the Tanzania Social Capital and Poverty Survey (SCPS), a large-scale survey that asked individuals about the extent and characteristics of their associational activity and their trust in various institutions and...

Cross-national data on economic growth rates show that increases in educational capital resulting from improvements in the educational attainment of the labor force have had no positive impact on the growth rate of output per worker. In fact, contends the author, the estimated impact of growth...