Expanding credit access is a key ingredient of development strategies worldwide. Microfinance practitioners, policymakers, and donors have ambitious goals for expanding access, and seek efficient methods for implementing and evaluating expansion. There is less consensus on the role of consumer...

This paper uses two comparable data sets from South Africa to examine the effect of household characteristics on poverty and living standards and how they have changed over the five years following the dismantling of apartheid. I find that while things have started showing signs of improvement,...

China's economic development in recent decades has been tremendous, but subject to debate. This paper calculates regional prices that make incomes comparable across both time and space using the Engel-curve approach. Incomes are adjusted using these price indices, providing new estimates of...

A subjective well-being approach is followed to assess the magnitude of inefficiency in the use of income. The information comes from a Mexican survey and an X-inefficiency technique is used. The paper shows that there exists substantial inefficiency in the use of income at all income levels,...

Given the current focus of international development policy on pro-poor growth and poverty reduction, the role of the informal sector in the process of economic development is again at the top of the research and policy agenda. A key question is if pro-poor growth policies have to address the...

When individual or household incomes are collected for administrative or scientific surveys, the reference period of income is sometimes a month, sometimes a quarter, and sometimes a year. This reference period of income likely affects the shape of the distribution and derived measures of...

In this paper we examine the concept of "vulnerability" (Townsend 1994) within thecontext of income mobility of the poor. We test for the dynamics of vulnerablehouseholds in the UK using Waves 1 - 12 of the British Household Panel Survey andfind that, of three different types of risks that we...

The paper is based on an individual life-cycle model, which describes the purely economic components of human capital. The present value of human capital is determined by all future income flows, which at the same time constitute the individual as well as the total tax base of a nation....

When individual or household incomes are collected for administrative or scientific surveys, the reference period of income is sometimes a month, sometimes a quarter, and sometimes a year. This reference period of income likely affects the shape of the distribution and derived measures of...

A subjective well-being approach is followed to assess the magnitude of inefficiency in the use of income. The information comes from a Mexican survey and an X-inefficiency technique is used. The paper shows that there exists substantial inefficiency in the use of income at all income levels,...