The working poor are situated in a very powerful context — the nexus of poverty and low-wage work. Our central premise is that this context represents a “strong situation” that powerfully affects work-related outcomes, but it has been largely overlooked by organization science, even as the...

This paper compares for 13 Latin American countries the poverty and inequality impacts of cash transfer programs that are given to all children and the elderly (that is, categorical transfers), to programs of equal budget that are confined to the poor within each population group (that is,...

Dramatic food price spikes in recent years have stimulated debate on the welfare implications of food price risk. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, the number of undernourished people in sub-Saharan Africa rose to a record 265 million in 2009. There is a...

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...

The South Asia region is home to the largest pool of individuals living under the poverty line, coupled with a fast-growing population. The importance of access to basic infrastructure services on welfare and the quality of life is clear. Yet the South Asia region's rates of access to...

This study provides an ex-ante analysis of the welfare effect from the improvement of border road infrastructure in Nigeria. It starts by describing the income distribution in the Nigerian states contained in the sample. It then analyses the relationship between income, household food...

Whether social transfers should be targeted or universal is an unsolved debate that is particularly relevant for the implementation of social protection schemes in developing countries. While the limited availability of public resources encourages targeting, the difficulty in identifying the...

This paper contributes to the methodological literature on the estimation of international poverty lines for Latin America based on the official poverty lines chosen by the Latin American governments and commonly used in the public debate. The paper exploits a comprehensive data set of 86...

The Alkire and Foster (2011) methodology, as the mainstream approach to the measurement of multi-dimensional poverty in the developing world, is insensitive to inequality among the multidimensionally poor individuals and does not consider simultaneously the concepts of efficiency and...

This paper provides a normative justification for the use of a minimum wage as a redistributive tool in a competitive labor market. We show that a government interested in improving the wellbeing of the deserving poor, while being less concerned with their undeserving counterparts, can use a...