Despite the increasing awareness concerning the importance of distinguishing chronic and transient poverty for policy making, cross-country comparative studies of poverty dynamics in developing countries are virtually non-existent. The small, though increasing, number of existing studies makes...

The citizens of Madagascar, and especially the capital Antananarivo, display marked support for democracy: adoption of its principles, rejection of authoritarian regimes, etc. The poor populations are no different from the other social groups in this respect. Nevertheless, living in a poor...

National accounts data indicate good performance since 1997. But how far can we trust this diagnostic given the weakness in official statistics? If the improvement in real growth reveals effective, do households benefit from it? To address these questions, this study analyzes reliable data from...

The success of Export Processing Zones (EPZs) or the Zone Franche in Madagascar is, with the exception of Mauritius, an isolated and unrecognized case in Africa. The Zone Franche has had a highly significant macroeconomic impact in terms of exports and jobs. Madagascar became the number two...

This article aims at supplying an interpretative frame of the long-term Malagasy trajectory by redrawing the structuring knots of its political economy. The concomitance of periods of economic expansion and political crises leash indeed to suppose that one of the essential sources of the...

The classical and more recent theories on development all fail to explain Madagascar’s long-running economic underperformance. This paper proposes a reinterpretation of Malagasy history based on the analytical framework of political economy. Our analyses point to the fact that, despite...

Because of the lack of panel data there have been few studies on poverty dynamics in developing countries. Furthermore, because of methodological differences, it is difficult to draw general conclusions from them. This paper analyses a large sample of Peruvian and Madagascan urban households...

Many fiscal reforms in LDC’s have relied on the introduction of a presumptive tax. Aims were to simplify the tax system and to enhance the fiscal base by introducing previously informal enterprises. Theoretical qualities of positive incidence and of redistribution effects have been shown, but...