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 median voter hypothesis is important to endogenous growth theories because it provides the political mechanisms through which voters in more unequal countries re-distribute a greater proportion of income and thus (it is argued), by blunting incentives, reduce the country's growth rate. But...

Many agricultural regions in the developing world are subject to severe droughts, which can have devastating effects on household incomes and consumption, especially for the poor. To protect consumption, rural households engage in many different risk management strategies - some mainly...

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,...

The authors test how well consumption is insured against income risk in a panel of sampled households in rural China. They estimate the risk insurance models by Generalized Method of Moments, treating income and household size as endogenous. Insurance exists for all wealth groups, although the...

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...

In the absence of household level data on participation in public programs, spending allocations and poverty measures across regions of Morocco are used to infer incidence across poor and non-poor groups and to decompose incidence within rural and urban areas separately, as well as to decompose...

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,...