It is commonly assumed that the cost of living is much higher in cities than in the country because housing rents are higher in urban areas and food staples cost more. This assumption has important implications for sectoral comparisons of welfare levels and distributions. The authors suspect...

In counting the poor, and measuring the severity of absolute poverty, one faces a number of difficult questions. What poverty line should be used? Should one use the same poverty line across all countries? How should one adjust for differences across countries in the purchasing power of their...

An effective public safety net can be important in a poor transition economy such as Vietnam. Yet we know very little about the performance of existing public transfers as a safety net. Using panel data, the paper investigates whether Vietnam's main social welfare transfers promoted poor people...

Vietnam's ethnic minorities, who tend to live mostly in remote rural areas, typically have lower living standards than the ethnic majority. How much is this because of differences in economic characteristics (such as education levels and land) rather than low returns to characteristics? Is there...

Public spending aims to promote efficiency and equity. This paper, drawn from a book on public spending and the poor, is concerned with the latter. In it, the author focuses on three key questions: what is the welfare objective? how are the benefits of public spending currently distributed? how...

How does Vietnam's public safety net affect outcomes for the poor? Although social welfare programs in Vietnam are centrally mandated, they are locally implemented according to local norms and local poverty standards and often rely heavily on local financing. The author examines the coverage,...

If the marginal gains from investment in physical capital depend positively on knowledge, but a household cannot hire skilled labor to compensate for low skills, then even if it has access to credit, the household will achieve lower returns than an educated household. If, as is common, the...

Routine"quick-and-dirty"methods of project appraisal can be so dirty in guiding project selection as to wipe out the net social gains from public investment, contend the authors, illustrating their point with a case study of irrigation projects in Vietnam. They test a common quick-and-dirty...

The author examines how rural road investment projects should be selected and appraised when the objective is poverty reduction. After critically reviewing past and current practices, the author develops an operational approach grounded in a public economics framework in which concerns of equity...