This paper reviews recent research dealing with the relationships between economic growth, income distribution, and poverty. This generally fails to find any systematic pattern of change in income distribution during recent decades. Neither does it find any systematic link from fast growth to...

Chile, in the last 15 years, has shown remarkable results in terms of growth, poverty reduction and democratic governance. This paper reviews the structural changes that were behind these positive outcomes, as well as the pending challenges for Chile’s development. Also shows that Chile did...

In the context of a collective household choice model, we show that the effects of improved credit access on search intensity by the unemployed are heterogeneous across households and dependent on the within-household bargaining power of the unemployed. We find empirical support for the...

Poor families around the world spend a large fraction of their income consuming goods that do not appear to alleviate poverty, while saving at low rates. We suggest that individuals care about economic status and hence we interpret this behavior as conspicuous consumption that is intended to...

The study proposes to evaluate the impact of the current financial crisis on remittances received by three South Asian countries, namely Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. The objective is twofold: to forecast the impact of change in remittances on the growth of these countries (macro level...

This paper examines the role of multinationals and international business in poverty alleviation, based on an analysis of articles in the top journals in business, economics, and policy. We develop a conceptual cross-disciplinary framework that maps and disentangles the impact of different types...

Emerging Europe has undergone a major economic transformation over the past 25 years. Most countries experienced initial drops in output during transition, followed by recovery in the second half of the 1990s. The path of transition in the Western Balkans has however been particularly uneven....

Poor families around the world spend a large fraction of their income on consumption of goods that appear to be useless in alleviating poverty, while saving at very low rates and neglecting investment in health and education. Such consumption patterns seem to be related to the persistence of...

Poor persons in poor countries are greatly exposed to the risk of adverse shocks, many of international origin, which can create long-lasting damage to individual well-being. There is a strong moral and prudential case for taking measures which reduce the extent to which such shocks arise and...

Purchasing power parity (PPP) exchange rates are extensively used by researchers and by policymakers. This paper proposes and implements a new methodology for calculating PPPs using information on unit values from household surveys. Although unit values are not identical to prices, they have...