This paper examines the distribution of climate change impacts across the 16 agro-ecological zones in Africa using data from the Food and Agriculture Organization combined with economic survey data from a Global Environment Facility/World Bank project. Net revenue per hectare of cropland is...

Energy poverty is a frequently used term among energy specialists, but unfortunately the concept is rather loosely defined. Several existing approaches measure energy poverty by defining an energy poverty line as the minimum quantity of physical energy neededto perform such basic tasks as...

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 objective of this paper is to determine the ability of farmers in Africa to detect climate change, and to ascertain how they have adapted to whatever climate change they believe has occurred. The paper also asks farmers whether they perceive any barriers to adaptation and attempts to...

Transfers to the rural land-poor are widely advocated and used in attempts to reduce rural poverty. Such transfers are believed to be productive, in that the final gain to the poor exceeds the initial transfer. The evidence cited most often to support this view is the negative correlation...

The authors examine how the food stamp program affected measures of poverty during devaluation of the Jamaican dollar in the early 1990s. They find that without the food stamp program, the poverty gap in Jamaica would have been much worse, especially in 1990 and 1991. For the country as a whole,...

Pessimists say industrialization increased poverty; optimists say it did not. The authors argue that how much industrialization eradicates poverty depends on the form industrialization takes. It is not economic growth by itself, but the processes and policies associated with different growth...

Workfare programs aim to reduce poverty by providing low-wage work for those who need it. They are often turned to in a crisis when there is too little time for a rigorous evaluation. They are also relatively complex programs, and difficult to evaluate. The author offers some simple analytical...

This paper is concerned with the problem of poverty in Mexico. Its four objectives are to : i) present evidence; ii) analyze economic determinants; iii) discuss policy options; and iv) assess existing poverty programs. The author begins by giving a very brief discussion of recent economic events,...

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,...