Theoretical work has shown that nonlinear dynamics in household incomes can yield poverty traps and distribution-dependent growth. If this is true, the potential implications for policy are dramatic: effective social protection from transient poverty would be an investment with lasting benefits,...

Standard economic analyses suggests that when the budget for redistribution is fixed, transfers should be targeted to (that is, means-tested for) those most in need. But both economists and political scientists have long recognized the possibility that targeting could undermine political support...

A large and growing proportion of the world's population is old; the elderly are often poor; and many countries face huge fiscal burdens because of promises they have made to give their older citizens income security. These government old-age security policies have been debated in developed...

Public spending aims to promote efficiency and equity. This paper, drawn from a book on public spending and the poor, is concerned with the latter. In it, the author focuses on three key questions: what is the welfare objective? how are the benefits of public spending currently distributed? how...

Practitioners from different disciplines use different meanings and concepts of vulnerability, which, in turn, have led to diverse methods of measuring it. This paper presents a selective review of the literature from several disciplines to examine how they define and measure vulnerability. The...

The authors develop a microeconometric method to account for differences across distributions of household income. Going beyond the determination of earnings in labor markets, they also estimate statistical models for occupational choice and for conditional distributions of education, fertility,...

The Egyptian food subsidy system is an untargeted system that is essentially open to all Egyptians. For this reason, the budgetary costs of this system have been high, and the ability of this system to improve the welfare status of the poor has been questioned. Since the food riots of 1977,...

Nonseparable household models outline the links between agricultural production and household consumption, yet empirical extensions to investigate the effect of production on dietary diversity and diet composition are limited. Although a significant literature has investigated the calorie-income...

This paper analyzes the impact of large-scale expansion of biofuels on the global income distribution and poverty. A global computable general equilibrium model is used to simulate the effects of the expansion of biofuels on resource allocation, commodity prices, factor prices and household...

The increase in the international price of rice is likely to have substantial negative impacts on the poor in countries such as Mali which are net importers of rice. This paper relies on a dynamic CGE model to estimate the likely impact of the recent increase in rice prices on poverty with and...