Randomly sampled workfare participants in a welfare-dependent region of Argentina were given a voucher that entitled an employer to a sizable wage subsidy. A second sample also received the option of skill training, while a third sample formed the control group. The authors analyze the effects...

Workfare programs aim to reduce poverty by providing low-wage work for those who need it. They are often turned to in a crisis when there is too little time for a rigorous evaluation. They are also relatively complex programs, and difficult to evaluate. The author offers some simple analytical...

Theoretical work has shown that nonlinear dynamics in household incomes can yield poverty traps and distribution-dependent growth. If this is true, the potential implications for policy are dramatic: effective social protection from transient poverty would be an investment with lasting benefits,...

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...

In theory, it is possible that the persistent poverty that has emerged in many transition economies, is attributable to underlying, non-convexities in the dynamics of household incomes - such that a vulnerable household will never recover from a sufficiently large, but short-lived shock to its...

The authors use China's national household surveys for rural and urban areas to measure and explain the welfare impacts of the changes in goods and factor prices attributed to WTO accession. Price changes are estimated separately using a general equilibrium model to capture both direct and...

The authors try to determine whether children sent to work in rural Bangladesh are caught in a poverty trap, with the extra income to poor families from child labor coming at the expense of the children's longer-term prospects of escaping poverty through education. The poverty trap argument...

It seems natural to expect the rich to oppose policies to redistribute income from the rich to the poor, and the poor to favor such policies. But this may be too simple a model, say the Authors. Expectations of future welfare may come into play. Well-off people on a downward trajectory may well...

The authors use Morocco's national survey of living standards to measure the short-term welfare impacts of prior estimates of the price changes attributed to various trade policy reforms for cereals-the country's main food staple. They find small impacts on mean consumption and inequality in the...

The authors argue that the welfare inferences drawn from subjective answers to questions on qualitative surveys are clouded by concerns about the structure of measurement errors and how latent psychological factors influence observed respondent characteristics. They propose a panel data model to...