While Africa's recent decade of growth and poverty reduction performance has been lauded, concern has been expressed regarding the structure of this growth. In particular, questions have been raised about whether the growth is based on a commodities boom, or whether it is the beginning of a...

As the financial crisis has spread through the world, the lack of real-time data has made it difficult to track its impact in developing countries. This paper uses a micro-simulation approach to assess the poverty and distributional effects of the crisis in the Philippines. The authors find...

This note details simulations of the distributional impacts of the 2009 financial crisis on households in Latvia. It uses household survey data collected prior to the crisis and simulates the impact of the growth slowdown. The simulations show that Latvia experienced a sharp rise in poverty,...

This paper analyzes the impact of large-scale expansion of biofuels on the global income distribution and poverty. A global computable general equilibrium model is used to simulate the effects of the expansion of biofuels on resource allocation, commodity prices, factor prices and household...

This paper uses farm panel data from Indonesia to examine dynamic patterns of land use, capital investments, and wages in agriculture. The empirical analysis shows that an increase in real wages has induced the substitution of labor by machines among relatively large farmers. Large farmers tend...

This paper analyzes changes in agricultural production and economic welfare of farmers in rural Peru resulting from a large irrigation infrastructure rehabilitation project. The analysis uses a ten-year district panel and a spatial regression discontinuity approach to measure the causal effect...

This report shows that Mali’s safety nets are insufficient to address the needs of the population and suggests ways to improve them. There is a need to devise a set of cost effective programs to expand the scope and coverage of the national safety net. Given that any reform plan must be...

Safety nets are on the rise in Africa, and beginning to evolve from scattered standalone programs into systems. Until recently, many African countries approached social protection on an ad-hoc basis. But when the global crisis threatened recent progress in poverty reduction, safety nets...

This paper studies the use of labor markets to mitigate the impact of violent shocks on households in rural areas in Colombia. It examines changes in the labor supply from on-farm to off-farm labor as a means of coping with the violent shock and the ensuing redistribution of time within...

This paper shows that support from the family continues to be an important source of support for the rural elderly, particularly the rural elderly over 70 years of age. Decline in likelihood of co-residence with, or in close proximity to, adult children raises the possibility that China's rural...