This paper presents an incidence analysis of both social spending and taxation for seven Latin American countries, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The analysis shows that Latin American countries are headed de facto toward a minimalist welfare state similar to the one in the United...

This paper will consider a range of consumer-oriented subsidy instruments, including general subsidies, and tax exemptions as well as targeted quotas. Section II discusses the distribution, or incidence of the subsidy expenditures for all these instruments. It focuses primarily on food as the...

The authors use a two-step, computationally simple procedure to analyze the effects of Mexico's potentially unilateral tariff liberalization. First, they use a computable general equilibrium model provided by the Global Trade Analysis Project (GTAP) as the new price generator. Second, they apply...

Some economists have argued that the process of disintegration of the world economy between the two world wars led to income divergence between the countries. This is in keeping with the view that economic integration leads to income convergence. The paper shows that the view that the period...

One of the most contentious issues of globalization is the effect of global economic integration on inequality and poverty. This paper documents five trends in the modern era of globalization, starting around 1980. Trend #1: Poor country growth rates have accelerated and are higher than rich...

Typically the tools available for redistribution are price subsidies and direct cash transfers. Conventional economic theory indicates that the efficiency loss is minimized if cash transfers are used instead of price subsidies. But in almost all economies, including advanced economies, price...

Few studies have tried to measure how households in a developing country save from each of the different income sources at their disposal. To help fill that gap, the Author uses five-year panel data to examine how households in rural Pakistan save from each of the seven separate sources of...

In theory, it is possible that the persistent poverty that has emerged in many transition economies, is attributable to underlying, non-convexities in the dynamics of household incomes - such that a vulnerable household will never recover from a sufficiently large, but short-lived shock to its...

The author uses household-level data from a nationally representative survey to analyze the impact of nonfarm income on income inequality in rural Egypt. After pinpointing the importance of nonfarm income to the rural poor, the author decomposes total rural income among five sources, nonfarm,...

The authors investigate recent rends in poverty, and inequality in China, decomposing data on poverty reduction to see who has benefited most from China's economic growth. They find that, by several measures, poverty declined significantly in the 1990s, across a wide range of poverty lines,...