The main objective of this paper is to provide estimates of the cost of moving out of subsistence for Madagascar's farmers. The analysis is based on a simple asset-return model of occupational choice. Estimates suggest that the entry (sunk) cost associated with moving out of subsistence can be...

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,...

During the transition from central planning to market economies now under way in Eastern Europe, output levels first collapsed by 40 to 50 percent in most countries, then staged a modest recovery in the last two years. Longer-term revival of growth requires a resumption of investment and thus,...

Policies and external shocks affecting agriculture, the main source of income for rural households, can be expected to have a significant impact on poverty. The authors study the case of Uganda. Throughout the 1990s, more than 90 percent of its poor lived in rural areas and, during the same...

This paper has two purposes. It first considers the impact on world food prices of the changes in restrictions on trade in staple foods during the 2008 world food price crisis. Those changes -- reductions in import protection or increases in export restraints -- were meant to partially insulate...

The authors assess the impact of Argentina's main social policy response to the severe economic crisis of 2002. The program aimed to provide direct income support for families with dependents, for whom the head had become unemployed due to the crisis. Counterfactual comparisons are based on a...

Comparing changes in inequality with initial levels, using new data, the author finds that within-country inequality in income or per capita consumption is converging toward medium levels--a Gini index around 40 percent. The finding is robust to allow for serially independent measurement error...

This paper uses a duration analysis based on adoption data spanning more than 25 years from six communities in the Central Highlands of Guatemala. The analysis explores how household characteristics and external trends play into both the adoption and diffusion processes of non-traditional...

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...

This paper proposes a new method for ex ante analysis of the poverty impacts arising from policy reforms. Three innovations underlie this approach. The first is the estimation of a global demand system using a combination of micro-data from household surveys and macro-data from the International...