Evidence on the implementation of India's National Rural Employment Guarantee Act suggests that the available work is often rationed by local leaders in poor areas, and that this is an important factor limiting the scheme's impact on poverty. The paper offers explanations for this empirical...

Thirty years ago, Nanak Kakwani provided elegant nonparametric formulae for the point elasticities of measures of poverty with respect to changes in the mean of the distribution of income, thus analytically linking the poverty measures to key macroeconomic aggregates. Numerous insights are found...