This paper shows how to take into account risk aversion when measuring poverty under income variability. An application to British panel data suggests that income and poverty comparisons between the self-employed and other groups of households are sensitive to assumptions on the degree of risk...

There is increasing recognition of the importance of dealing with material hardship rather than just income poverty. This paper deals with electricity disconnection and shows how Electricité de France (EDF), the French monopoly provider of electricity, has been testing a number of new policy...

International Financial Institutions have advocated the privatization of integrated agricultural monopsonies in developing countries with the hope that competition between private firms under a contract farming system would reduce inefficiencies in production and enable farmers to obtain a...

A limitation of most empirical cross-country studies that focus on determinants of GDP or GDP growth is that they fail to distinguish explicitly between inputs used in production and conditions that facilitate production. For example, physical capital, human capital, and labor are production...

The spike in global food prices in 2008 led to significantly higher food prices across the developing world. Global commodity prices have since fallen but remain volatile, and local food prices remain high in many countries. The authors review the evidence on the potential impact of higher food...