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...

The unevenness of the rise in rural living standards in the various states of India since the 1950s allowed the authors to study the causes of poverty. They modeled the evolution of average consumption and various poverty measures using pooled state-level data for 1957-91. They found that...

Using household data from five successive national surveys, the author analyzes the microdeterminants of (and changes in) consumption, poverty, growth, and inequality in Bangladesh from 1983 to 1996. Education, demographics, land ownership, occupation, and geographic location all affect...

Despite tremendous macroeconomic instability in Brazil, the country's distributions of urban income in 1976 and 1996 appear, at first glance, deceptively similar. Mean household income per capita was stagnant, with minute accumulated growth (4.3 percent) over the two decades. The Gini...

For health outcomes, is poverty destiny? The authors explore this question for life expectancy in Africa, where health outcomes are positively correlated with income, but where the link is far from uniform. The key variables associated with good health outcomes (controlling for health...

The public sector's performance in the Caribbean varies, in reducing poverty and in creating an enabling environment for growth. Barbados and the Bahamas have been the high performers, Guyana and the Dominican Republic have been sluggish, and the other Caribbean countries fall in between. In the...

The authors describe the evolution of relative wages in five Latin American countries-Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, and Mexico. They use repeated cross-sections of household surveys, and decompose the evolution of relative wages into factors associated with changes in relative supply and...

The authors investigate whether micro-simulation techniques can shed light on the types of policies that should be adopted by countries wishing to meet their Millennium Development Goals. They compare two families of micro-simulations. The first family of micro-simulations decomposes required...

The authors show how subjective poverty lines can be derived using simple qualitative assessments of perceived consumption adequacy, based on a household survey. Respondents were asked whether their consumption of food, housing, and clothing was adequate for their family's needs. The author's...

In Peru, as in many other developing countries, employers have the legal obligation to compensate workers who are dismissed through no fault of their own. Is this an efficient mechanism for providing income support to the unemployed? The authors seek an answer to this question, using individual...