The paper explores whether one of the largest programs in the world for women's empowerment and rural livelihoods, the Indira Kranti Patham in Andhra Pradesh, India, has had an impact on the economic and social wellbeing of households that participate in the program. The analysis usespanel data...

This paper provides relevant indicators and measurements useful for public policies seeking the expansion of equitable human development opportunities for Egyptian children and youth. To measure equitable access to opportunities, the authors use the Human Opportunity Index to examine the...

This paper shows how differences in aggregate human development outcomes over time and space can be additively decomposed into a pure economic-growth component, a component attributed to differences in the distribution of income, and components attributed to"non-income"factors and differences in...

Between 1996 and 2006, Nepal experienced violent civil conflict as a consequence of a Maoist insurgency, which many argue also brought about an increase in female empowerment. This paper exploits within and between-district variation in the intensity of violence to estimate the impact of...

This paper investigates the effect of exposure to violent conflict on human capital accumulation in Burundi. It combines a nationwide household survey with secondary sources on the location and timing of the conflict. Only 20 percent of the birth cohorts studied (1971-1986) completed primary...

This study analyzes opportunities for children in Cote d'Ivoire, where opportunities refer to access to basic services and goods that improve the likelihood of a child maximizing his or her human potential. The principle that guides this analysis is one of equality of opportunity, which is that...

Monitoring data are generally collected as a by-product of the process of monitoring program implementation. Yet this rich source of data have not been exploited to assess the effectiveness of the program. In this paper the authors use detailed administered data from a large-scale,...

Survey-based estimates of average program participation conditional on income are often used in assessing the distributional impacts of public spending reforms. But program participation could well be nonhomogeneous, so that marginal impacts of program expansion or contraction differ greatly...

This paper presents evidence about the impact on school enrollment of a program in Ecuador that gives cash transfers to the 40 percent poorest families. The evaluation design consists of a randomized experiment for families around the first quintile of the poverty index and of a regression...

Despite modest economic growth over the past decade, the Philippines have made little progress in reducing poverty. In this regard, the Philippines is an outlier in the region, seemingly unable to translate economic growth into meaningful poverty reduction. This underscores the fact that...