Seen in historical perspective the main economic predicaments of the present world (such as poverty, inequality, backwardness) appear in a somewhat different light than in many current discussions, especially by sociologists, radical economists and political scientists. In the present paper the...

A 2015 World Bank report on attainment of Millennium Development Goals concludes that the number of extremely poor has dropped substantially in all regions with the exception of Sub-Saharan Africa. We assess if poverty is in the African gene by revisiting the findings of Ashraf and Galor (2013,...

A 2015 World Bank report on attainment of Millennium Development Goals concludes that the number of extremely poor has dropped substantially in all regions with the exception of Sub-Saharan Africa. We assess if poverty is in the African gene by revisiting the findings of Ashraf and Galor (2013,...

We review the relationship between trade and poverty in less developed countries, surveying both relevant economic theory and empirical evidence. We conclude that, while there certainly are circumstances under which greater trade openness can lead to poverty reduction, these circumstances do not...

We provide cross-country empirical evidence on the link between measures of institutional development and of poverty over the period 1960-1990. We find that the more efficient the institutions, the lower the degree, severity, and incidence of poverty. We provide both ordinary least squares and...

We study the empirical relationship between democracy and growth using grid-based panel regression and regime-transition frameworks. Our set-up nests several existing approaches, such as Barro (1996) and Gerring et al. (2005), and reconciles their conflicting messages in a more general model,...

We argue that with interdependent utility functions growth can lead to a decline in total welfare of a society if the gains from growth are sufficiently unequally distributed in the presence of negative externalities, i.e., envy

We use aggregate GDP data and within-country income shares for the period 1970-1998 to assign a level of income to each person in the world. We then estimate the gaussian kernel density function for the worldwide distribution of income. We compute world poverty rates by integrating the density...

We estimate the world distribution of income by integrating individual income distributions for 125 countries between 1970 and 1998. We estimate poverty rates and headcounts by integrating the density function below the $1/day and $2/day poverty lines. We find that poverty rates decline...

This publication contains a detailed analysis of the baseline profile of both program participants and non-participants (as a comparison group) of the third phase of the CFPR-TUP program. In particular, the following broad areas of the survey respondents’ lives and livelihoods are covered in...