Measuring poverty remains a complex and contentious issue. This is particularly true in sub-Saharan Africa where poverty rates are higher, information bases typically weaker, and the underlying determinants of welfare relatively volatile. This paper employs recently collected data on household...

During the twentieth century, internal migration and urbanization shaped Brazil’s economic and social landscape. Cities grew tremendously, while immigration participated in the rapid urbanization process and the redistribution of poverty between rural and urban areas. In 1950, about a third of...

The paper tracks recent changes in the components of social protection in Latin America, the reforms to social insurance in the 1990s and the growth of social assistance in the 2000s, and assesses their effects on poverty and inequality and implications for welfare institutions in the region....

The United Nations Millennium Declaration commits to halving extreme poverty between 2000 and 2015. The South African government has set a goal of halving poverty by 2014, although the meaning of this goal has not yet been defined. This article specifies government.s stated target of halving...

While land reforms have long been motivated as a potential policy lever of rural growth and development, there is remarkably little evidence of the direct impacts of such reforms. In an effort to fill this lacunae, this paper examines South Africa's Land Redistribution for Agricultural...

This paper discusses data from a survey and in-depth interviews on elite perceptions of poverty in Brazil. De Swaan tried to identify the circumstances under which elites are willing to mobilize resources in order to promote poverty reduction. This paper questions if de Swaan’s analysis...

Economic growth in Vietnam has been fairly resilient to the global commodity and financial crises, but it is unclear why. In addition, the impact of the crises on employment and poverty is in dispute. We develop a dynamic computable general equilibrium model to decompose impacts and estimate...

The present study examines the degree to which income distribution affects the ability of economic growth to reduce poverty, based on 1990s data for a sample of rural and urban sectors of African economies. Using the basic needs approach, an analysis-ofcovariance model is derived and estimated,...

Analysing a large sample of 1980–2004 unbalanced panel data, the current study presents comparative global evidence on the role of (income) inequality in poverty reduction. The evidence involves both an indirect channel via the tendency of high inequality to decrease the rate at which income...

Many low income countries in Africa are optimistic that producing biofuels domestically will not only reduce their dependence on imported fossil fuels, but also stimulate economic development, particularly in poorer rural areas. Skeptics, on the other hand, view biofuels as a threat to food...