The informal sector (IS) plays a significant role in developing countries viz. the provision of employment, income and supplying ignored markets. However, working and employment conditions within the sector are still poor. Its expansion and changing structures have thus drawn the attention of...

This paper contributes towards the growing debate concerning the world distribution of income and its evolution over that past three to four decades. Our methodological approach is twofold. First, we formally test for the number of modes in a cross-sectional analysis where each country is...

This study investigates the pro-poorness of income growth in Nigeria. Using nationally representative data for 1996 and 2004, overall income growth in Nigeria was found not to be pro-poor. The richer segments of the population appropriate greater share of benefits from economic growth. Household...

This paper examines the relationship among poverty, economic growth, and inequality by decomposing poverty changes at subnational levels. The results were examined against the performances of the different economic sectors in the regions to understand the relationships while accounting for the...

Endogenous time discounting is introduced in a two-period human-capital-driven growth model: subjective discount rate depends upon the level of human capital. This assumption accords strongly with the micro-level evidence. In the model an individual optimizes consumption over two periods. Low...

Of the world's 6.7 billion people (as of 2008), 1.3 billion lived on less than $1.25 Purchasing Power Parity dollars per person per day and another 1.7 billion lived on between $1.25 and $2.50 PPP dollars (Chen and Ravallion, 2012). The scourge of absolute economic misery among billions of the...

The main driver of poverty reduction has shifted from agricultural to non-agricultural income growth in rural Philippines in the past two decades. Agricultural growth is still relatively more important (vis-à-vis non-agricultural growth), however, in reducing rural poverty in relatively more...

This paper focuses on the importance data issues to the analysis of growth, poverty and economic inequality. We introduce a number of major databases frequently used in applied research on growth, poverty and global and international inequality. A discussion of data quality, data consistency,...

This paper examines the causal relationship between inequality and a number of macroeconomic variables frequently found in the inequality and growth literature. These include growth, openness, wages, and liberalisation. We review the existing cross-country empirical evidence on the effects of...

Although urban China has experienced spectacular income growth over the last two decades, increases in inequality, reduction in social welfare provision, deregulation of grain prices, and increases in income uncertainty in the 1990s have increased urban poverty. Using a large repeated...