The Brazilian Northeast is a region characterized by high levels of poverty and inequality. These aspects hinder its prospects of economic development. A possible way to alleviate these problems is to improve the early-life conditions of the poor. In 2000, the Brazilian government launched the...

This paper examines the relationship between measures of income poverty, undernourishment, childhood undernutrition, and child mortality in developing countries. While there is, as expected, a close aggregate correlation between these measures of deprivation, the measures generate some...

Relative deprivation (RD), also known as relative poverty, an idea implicitly put forward by Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations and formally conceptualized by Runciman (1966), refers to the discontent people feel when they compare their positions to others and realize that others in the group...

This paper describes the results of initial work analysing a panel of rural households in Peru between 1994 and 2004 to determine household responses to changes in relative prices of traditional versus export-oriented products. Our principal interest was to better understand how household...

A detailed examination of Amartya Sen's theory of famines shows that it is logically impossible: it cannot work in the real world. His attempt to apply it to the Bengal Famine of 1943 relies on repeated and consistent misstatements of the evidence in his sources. He relies almost entirely on the...

The study tries to answer the following questions: Will exposure to world agricultural prices generate more poverty or less? To what extent will households be affected by changes in agricultural trade polices? Do multilateral agricultural liberalization matter more than bilateral changes?...

Agriculture sector being an important and fundamental sector of the economy is the way of life for more than half of the Pakistan’s population. Its major sector is livestock sector. Livestock sector is the source of income and a safety against the crop failures or drought. Most of the rural...

Mali is a Sub-Saharan African country with 19.1 million people. Almost half of this population lives in poverty, due to the dysfunction of activity sectors (agriculture, energy, education, employment, services, etc.). Natural resource management especially land and water together with...

Income-based as well as most existing multidimensional poverty indices (MPI) assume equal distribution within the household and thus are likely to lead to yield a biased assessment of individual poverty, and poverty by age or gender. In this paper we first show that the direction of the bias...

When comparing economic well-being using income or expenditures, an equivalence scale is often used to adjust for differences in characteristics that affect needs. For example, a family of two is assumed to need more income than a single person, but not twice as much due to the economies of...