The author investigates the effects of a marginal tax reform on household welfare in Mexico. He estimates the extent to which Mexican households react to changes in prices, and uses the estimates to simulate changes in social welfare resulting from marginal tax reform. Results indicate that...

The measurement of inequality of opportunity has hitherto not been attempted in a number of countries because of data limitations. This paper proposes two alternative approaches to circumventing the missing data problems in countries where a demographic and health survey and an ancillary...

The author examines, taking into account the urban-rural divides, the changes and welfare implications of income diversification in Zimbabwe following macroeconomic policy changes and droughts of the early 1990s. Data from two comparable national income, consumption and expenditure surveys in...

Seasonal poverty in Bangladesh, locally known as monga, refers to seasonal deprivation of food during the pre-harvest season of Aman rice. An analysis of household income and expenditure survey data shows that average household income and consumption are much lower during monga season than in...

The authors develop a microeconometric method to account for differences across distributions of household income. Going beyond the determination of earnings in labor markets, they also estimate statistical models for occupational choice and for conditional distributions of education, fertility,...

Official tabulations from household survey data suggest rising income inequality in post-reform rural China, a trend of public concern. But the structural changes in China's rural economy have not been properly reflected in the methods used to process raw survey data. Using micro data from four...

The 20th Human Development Report has introduced a new version of its famous Human Development Index (HDI). The HDI aggregates country-level attainments in life expectancy, schooling and income per capita. Each year's rankings by the HDI are keenly watched in both rich and poor countries. The...

The 2008"food price crisis"and more recent spikes in food prices have led to a greater focus on policies and programs to cushion their impact on poverty and malnutrition. Estimating the income elasticity of micro-nutrients and assessing how they change during such crises is an important part of...

The joint determination of aggregate economic growth and distributional change has been studied empirically from at least three different perspectives. A macroeconomic approach that relies on cross-country data on poverty, inequality, and growth rates has generated some interesting stylized...

This paper brings together some of the empirical work conducted by IFPRI researchers which investigates linkages among the degree of consumption insurance, households'vulnerability to poverty, and household use of formal and informal coping mechanisms using the same empirical approach in five...