Throughout the developing world, there is a desperate quest for a way out ofthe financial predicament confronting the rural poor. In most countries of thedeveloping regions, especially South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa, the ruralpopulation forms the larger proportion of the entire population and...

Skill-biased technical change has occupied empirical economists for much of the 90s. However, the empirical literature has not progressed much beyond observing a positive correlation between technology indicators and demand shifts. Two hypotheses on the root causes of skill biases in technical...

The paper sheds light on the impact of spatial agglomeration of humancapital on individual wages in Western Germany. Using panel data itshows that regional wage differentials are to a large extent attributableto localized human capital externalities arising from the regional share ofhighly...

Using parametric formulae under lognormality for a broad family of povertymeasures, we show that when inequality measured by the Gini coeffcient isconstant, dening the poverty line as a fraction of a central tendency of theliving standard distribution restricts the evolution of the poverty...

Living standard indicators are complex nonlinear statistics based on fundamen-tal components (income or consumption data, prices, household characteristics andenvironment). The statistical distributions of these components, which are oftenincompletely obseved, are central to study utilitarian...

A priori knowledge about the shape of living standards distribution has notbeen fully exploited in the literature to investigate properties of poverty indices.The method we propose is to exploit credible distributional assumptions to: generateadditional properties for poverty indices; relate the...

We derive an explicit formula of the Watts’ poverty index, in terms of parametersof bivariate lognormal distributions of price indices and nominal livingstandards. This result enables us to: analyse the contributions of the distributionsof prices and nominal living standards in poverty;...

With a foreigner share of almost 20 percent and a traditionally tight labourmarket, Switzerland has evolved into an immigration country against its own intention. In thepast, many low-qualified workers originally recruited on a temporary basis were allowed tosettle in Switzerland. This approach...

The British Industrial Revolution triggered a reversal in the social order whereby the landed elite was replaced by industrial capitalists rising from the middle classesas the economically dominant group. Many observers have linked this transformation to the contrast in values between a...

We study the dispersion in rates of provincial economic- and TFP growth in China. Our results show that regional growth patterns can be understood as a function of several interrelated factors, which include investment in physical capital, human capital, and infrastructure capital...