Welfare comparisons may be sensitive to the assumptions made about economies of scale within households. This paper uses recent advances in sequential stochastic dominance techniques to show how to test for the robustness of poverty and housing quality comparisons to assumptions about economies...

Welfare comparisons may be sensitive to the assumptions made about economies of scale within households. This paper uses recent advances in sequential stochastic dominance techniques to show how to test for the robustness of poverty and housing quality comparisons to assumptions about economies...

Although sequential stochastic dominance techniques have been used in the literature to make comparisons of income poverty which are robust to the assumptions made about the economies of scale within households, the techniques could be applied to a much wider set of issues. In this paper, we...

This paper proposes techniques to test whether growth has been pro-poor. We first review different definitions of pro-poorness and argue for the use of methods that can generate results that are robust over classes of pro-poor measures and ranges of poverty lines. We then provide statistical...

This paper proposes a new methodology to test for whether indirect tax reforms are pro-poor. The methodology extends stochastic dominance techniques and enables identifying tax reforms that will necessarily be deemed absolutely or relatively pro-poor by a wide spectrum of poverty analysts. The...

This paper provides a comparative assessment of the market share, reach to the poor, and performance of faith-based and public schools in Sierra Leone using data from the 2004 Integrated Household Survey. One-third of primary school students attend government schools and more than half are in...

This paper provides a comparative assessment of the market share, reach to the poor, and performance of faith-based and public schools in the Democratic Republic of Congo using data from the 2004-2005 "123" survey. More than two thirds of primary school students attend faith-based...

World cotton prices have been declining in the past decade and farmers in West and Central Africa have been especially hard hit. This has led to heated policy debates and difficult trade-offs for governments, as their desire to help producers is constrained by the need to avoid large subsidies...

It has long been argued that faith-inspired health facilities serve the poor in priority in sub-Saharan Africa, in part by being located in remote and poor areas where the reach of government services may remain limited. Unfortunately, proper empirical evidence to back up such claims is rarely...