The prominent place of the chapter on poverty in the Johannesburg Plan of Implementation (JPI) is totally in keeping with the priority given to poverty reduction in the development thinking of the international community of today. The Johannesburg process did not lead to any new insights or new...

In 2003, the European Union adopted a new social indicator, the “in-work at-risk-of-poverty rate”. According to the European definition, the working poor are all workers who live in a household with an equivalised household disposable income below the poverty threshold. This indicator is...

Microfinance is often assumed to be an ethically progressive industry, but in recent years it has been the target of much ethical criticism. Microfinance institutions have been accused of using exploitative lending techniques and charging usurious interest rates; and critics even question the...

We apply the collective consumption model of Browning et al. (2010) to analyse economic well-being and poverty among the elderly. The model focuses on individual preferences, a consumption technology that captures the economies of scale of living in a couple, and a sharing rule that governs the...