Vietnam's high economic growth in the 1990s led to sharp reductions in poverty, yet over the same time period inequality increased. This increased inequality may be less worrisome if Vietnamese households experience a high degree of income mobility over time. This is because high mobility...

As part the Local Level Institutions study of local life in villages in rural Indonesia information was gathered on sampled household's participation in social activities. We classified the reported activities into four distinct types of social activity: sociability, networks, social...

Over the past decade the international community, especially the World Bank, has conducted programs to increase local public service delivery in developing countries by improving local governing institutions and creating social capital. This paper evaluates one such program in Sudan to answer...

What factors influence community participation in the delivery of urban services? In particular, does security of tenure enhance the probability of participation as it provides individuals with incentives to act collectively in pursuit of a common objective? And are collective efforts less...

Decentralized forest management is an important policy issue in India and elsewhere. Yet there are few careful studies of the impacts of community forestry. The authors try to fill this gap by analyzing National Sample Survey data from 524 villages in five states in India. Their analysis seeks...

Across the developing world, public goods exert significant impacts on the local rural economy in general and agricultural productivity and welfare outcomes in particular. Economic and social-cultural heterogeneity have, however, long been documented as detrimental to collective capacity to...

The authors describe trends in single parenthood in Russia, examining factors that affect living arrangements in single-mother families. Before economic reform, single mothers and their children were somewhat protected form poverty by government assistance (income support, subsidized child care,...

The authors analyze the widespread effects of the financial crisis in Russia to explore the vulnerabilities of households in Moldova. They show that the crisis had differential impacts on households, affecting most the urban and better-off. Households'decisions about education and health...

Much attention has been paid to the relative vulnerability of two well-defined household groups during the transition. Some observers argue that old-age pensioner households have been relatively protected because of a less steep decline in real pensions compared with wages in most transition...

There are several theoretical reasons why globalization will have a narrowing as well as widening effect on the gender wage gap, but little is known about the actual impact, except for a number of country studies. The author provides a cross-country study of the impact of globalization on the...