After a decade of slow economic growth Egypt's rate of growth recovered in the late 1990s, averaging more than five percent a year. But the effect of this growth on poverty patterns has not been systematically examined using consistent, comparable household datasets. In this paper, the authors...

Much attention has been paid to the relative vulnerability of two well-defined household groups during the transition. Some observers argue that old-age pensioner households have been relatively protected because of a less steep decline in real pensions compared with wages in most transition...

Standard methods of measuring poverty assume that an individual is poor if he or she lives in a family whose income or consumption lies below an appropriate poverty line. Such methods provide only limited insight into male and female poverty separately. Nevertheless, there are reasons why...

The authors show how subjective poverty lines can be derived using simple qualitative assessments of perceived consumption adequacy, based on a household survey. Respondents were asked whether their consumption of food, housing, and clothing was adequate for their family's needs. The author's...

Comparisons of poverty rates are only rarely based on identical underlying definitions of welfare. The authors examine the sensitivity of poverty rates calculated from alternative definitions of consumption. They consider what theory can say about the direction of bias in comparisons and show...

The authors analyze the subjective perceptions of poverty in Madagascar in 2001 and their relationship to objective poverty indicators. They base their analysis on survey responses to a series of subjective perception questions. The authors extend the existing empirical methodology for...

The authors profile Nigerian poverty, showing its evolution from 1985 to 1992. This paper is divided into 6 sections, beginning with an overview. Section 2 looks at the sources of data used. Section 3 examines household income and expenditure distribution, interprets poverty indices, and...

Empirical investigations of poverty in developing countries tend to focus on the incidence of poverty at a particular point in time. If the incidence of poverty increases, however, there is no information about how many new poor have joined the existing poor and how many people have escaped...

The authors combine household survey and census data to construct a provincial poverty map of Vietnam and evaluate the accuracy of geographically targeted antipoverty programs. First, they estimate per capita expenditure as a function of selected household and geographic characteristics using...

An assessment of the welfare gains from a targeted social program can be seriously biased unless it takes proper account of the endogeneity of program participation. Bias comes from two sources of placement endogeneity: the purposive targeting of the geographic areas to receive the program, and...