Environmental degradation can inflict serious damage on poor people because their livelihoods often depend on natural resource use and their living conditions may offer little protection from air, water, and soil pollution. At the same time, poverty-constrained options may induce the poor to...

Program administrators are often faced with the difficult problem of allocating scarce resources among regions in a country when interventions are aimed at addressing multiple objectives. One main concern is the tradeoff between poverty reduction and improvement of environmental quality. To...

The author investigates the determinants and dynamics of poverty during the five-year growth period that followed the 1994 CFA franc devaluation in Burkina Faso. Results show that the nature and dynamics of poverty determinants are influenced by the spatial location of households and that the...

The authors aim to assess the possible impacts of the Doha Round of negotiations on poverty in Cameroon. During the recent period of economic recovery, Cameroon enjoyed a sharp decline in poverty, with the headcount index falling from 53.3 percent of inhabitants in 1996 to 40.2 percent in 2001,...

The explosion of informal entrepreneurial activity during Mongolia's transition to a market economy represents one of the most visible signs of change in this expansive but sparsely populated Asian country. To deepen our understanding of Mongolia's informal sector during the transition, the...

This paper contains abstracts of Policy Research working paper series, numbers 2803 - 2856.

Are the determinants of chronic and transient poverty different? Do policies that reduce transient poverty also reduce chronic poverty? The authors decompose measures of household poverty into chronic and transient components and use censored conditional quantile estimators to investigate the...

The authors compare three approaches to linking representative-household macro models with micro household income data in terms of their implications for measuring the poverty and distributional effects of policy shocks. These approaches are a simple micro-accounting method, an extension of that...

The authors analyze sectoral growth in Ecuador, using multivariate co-integration analysis. They find significant long-run relationships between the agricultural, industrial, and service sectors. Moreover, they are able to derive dynamic sector models that combine the short-run links between the...

There has been much debate recently about the role of international development institutions, such as the World Bank in middle-income countries. Some observers have suggested that middle-income countries have reached a stage in their economic development that calls into question the rationale...