We find that the distribution of income matters to aggregate carbon dioxide emissions and hence global warming. Higher inequality, both between and within countries is associated with lower carbon emissions at given average incomes. We also confirm that economic growth generally comes with...

April 2000 - Community-level targeting of antipoverty programs is now common. Do local community organizations target the poor better than the central government? In one program in Bangladesh, the answer tends to be yes, but performance varies from village to village. The authors try to explain...

Community-level targeting of antipoverty programs is now common. Do local community organizations target the poor better than the central government? In one program in Bangladesh, the answer tends to be yes, but performance varies from village to village. The authors try to explain why. It is...

How did we come to think that eliminating poverty is a legitimate goal for public policy? What policies emerged in the hope of attaining that goal? The last 200 years have witnessed a dramatic change in thinking about poverty. Mainstream economic thinking in the eighteenth century held that...

Cross-country comparisons of social indicators controlling for income and/or social spending have been widely used to measure and explain quot;social efficiencyquot; analogously to quot;technical efficiencyquot; in production. Ravallion argues that these methods are clouded in ambiguities about...