This paper investigates whether the utilization of microcredit programs has a significant impact on the income and net worth of the participants. Several micro finance institutes are optimistic on the beneficial effects of microcredit programs. Others describe microcredit with interest rates in...

Despite the popularity and unique nature of women's self-help groups in India, evidence of their economic impacts is scant. Based on two rounds of a 2,400 household panel, the authors use double differences, propensity score matching, and pipeline comparison to assess economic impacts of longer...

The paper revisits the siteof a large, World Bank-financed, rural development program in China 10 years after it began and four years after disbursements ended. The program emphasized community participation in multi-sectoral interventions (including farming, animal husbandry, infrastructure and...

This paper estimates the relationship between initial village inequality and subsequent household income growth for a large sample of households in rural China. Using a rich longitudinal survey spanning the years 1987-2002, and controlling for an array of household and village characteristics,...

What part of the inequality observed in a particular country is due to unequal opportunities, rather than to differences in individual efforts or luck? This paper estimates a lower bound for the opportunity share of inequality in labor earnings, household income per capita and household...

Household enterprises -- usually one-person-operated tiny informal enterprises -- are a rapidly growing source of employment in Sub-Saharan Africa, especially in lower-income countries. Household enterprises tend to operate with limited interest or support from governments. This is the case in...

Jordan's economic growth in the past decade has translated into a significant rise in household consumption and a decline in poverty and inequality indicators. Yet, the sentiment of the overall population seems to point to worsening disparities. Using official household expenditure surveys for...

The poor in Bangladesh are more likely to belong to households with a larger number of dependents and lower education among household members, be engaged in daily wage labor, own little land, and be less likely to receive remittances. This poverty profile for 2005 is similar to the profile in...

The report lays out options to use social safety nets to meet the goal set by the Government of Botswana to eradicate extreme poverty by 2016 and in a budget neutral way. Introducing a Family Support Grant is argued to be a more efficient way to address absolute poverty by offering a family...

Although resilience has become a popular concept in studies of poverty and vulnerability, it has been difficult to obtain a credible measure of resilience. This difficulty is because the data required to measure resilience, which involves observing household outcomes over time after every...