Conditional cash transfer programs (CCTs) have two main objectives: reducing poverty and increasing the human capital of children. To reach these objectives, transfers are given to poor households conditioned on investments in their children’s education, health, and nutrition. Targeting...

This paper proposes a new index of governance based on the Alkire-Foster methodology and compares it with the Mo Ibrahim Index of African Governance. The proposed new index improves on existing measures of governance in two ways. First, it is able to incorporate both cardinal and ordinal...

We show how to minimize the probability of misclassifying individuals as being poor or not poor when data on some of their relevant attributes are missing, but an estimate of the population distribution of attributes is available.

Global poverty rates have declined considerably, but the number of people living in extreme poverty remains high. Many of the poor are smallholder farmers. Agricultural commercialization - meaning a shift from subsistence to more market-oriented farming - can play a central role in improving...

In this paper we compare and contrast the view on poverty of lay people, who are affected by the policies, with that of academics and policy-makers. Drawing from fieldwork in a village in Kerala, India, and applying the 'participatory numbers' approach, we devise a 'local method' to identify...

Water is critical for agriculture in developing countries and climate change has created extreme weather events that push farmers into poverty. In this study, we first examine the role of yearround irrigation at village level in ensuring irrigation at household level and helping farmers to cope...

We broaden the analysis of pro-poor growth in monetary terms to include non-monetary dimensions of poverty and to compare the results obtained from both indicators, namely consumer expenditures and a composite poverty indicator. In addition, we use several pro-poor growth measurements to see in...

This paper reviews the main problems that have to be faced when taking a multidimensional approach to poverty and gives a survey of the solutions that have hitherto been proposed to solve these problems. The paper starts with a quick summary of the cardinal approach to uni-dimensional poverty...

After an impressive 12 point reduction in Peruvian monetary poverty, questions have been raised about the extent in which these figures mask deprivation in several other aspects critical for human development. We propose using the Alkire-Foster multidimensional headcount to address this issue,...