Agriculture's share in an economy invariably declines as per capita income rises and as the economy develops. The literature on its causes has focused on the relative price effects arising from demand factors--especially Engel's Law (that the proportion of income spent on food declines as...

The authors examine the growth and convergence of total factor productivity in agriculture and manufacturing in a large sample of countries spanning many levels of development over the period 1967-1992. There is a widely held but rarely tested view that the rate of growth in agricultural...

The fact that raising taxes can increase taxed labor supply through income effects is frequently used to justify much lower measures of the marginal welfare cost of taxes and greater public good provision than indicated by traditional, compensated analyses. The authors confirm that this...

The results of new direct price level comparisons across 148 countries in 2005 have led to large revisions of purchasing power parity exchanges rates, particularly for China and India. The recalculation of international and global inequalities, using the new purchasing power parity rates, shows...

This paper presents a new methodology to measure inequality that optimally combines household survey information and tax records to construct a complete income distribution. Combining the two data sources is necessary because, on the one hand, household surveys do not accurately represent the...

The economic debate on existence and definition of the middle class has become particularly lively in many developing countries. Despite this growing interest, the identification of the middle class group in these countries remains quite challenging. Building on a recently developed framework to...

Building on earlier work by political philosophers, economists have recently sought to define a concept of equity that accommodates the fairness of reward to individual responsibility and effort, while allowing for the existence of some inequalities which are unfair and should be compensated....

This paper presents a detailed picture of how sustained growth in Egypt over 2005-2008 affected different groups both above and below the poverty line. This analysis, based on the Household Income, Expenditure and Consumption Panel Survey conducted by Egypt’s national statistical agency,...

Economic development is a process of continuous industrial and technological upgrading in which any country, regardless of its level of development, can succeed if it develops industries that are consistent with its comparative advantage, determined by its endowment structure. The secret winning...

Empirical evidence suggests that money in the hands of mothers (as opposed to their husbands) benefits children. Does this observation imply that targeting transfers to women is good economic policy? The authors develop a series of noncooperative family bargaining models to understand what kind...