The paper studies the relation between globalization, inequality and marginalization, within and across nations. It reviews the existing evidence on globalization and global inequality and argues, using a simple theoretical model, that the two are inter-connected. It discusses policy alternative...

Virtually all industrialized nations have annual per capita incomes greater than $15,000; meanwhile, over three billion people, more than half the world's population, live in countries with per capita incomes of less than $700. Development economics studies the economies of such countries and the...

This paper tries to advance the perspective that the poor and the marginalized in society lack a sense of “participatory equity,†by building a new model where a person’s community identity matters, ex post, in determining if he or she will be poor, even though (unlike in the...

This paper investigates why children work by studying the wage elasticity of child labour supply. Incorporating subsistence constraints in to a model of labour supply, we show that a negative wage elasticity favours the hypothesis that poverty compels work whereas a positive wage elasticity...

The world's poorest people lack capital and skills and toil for others in occupations that others shun. Using a large-scale and long-term randomized control trial in Bangladesh this paper demonstrates that sizable transfers of assets and skills enable the poorest women to shift out of...

The techniques of simple random sampling are seldom appropriate in the empirical analysis of income distributions. Various types of weighting schemes are usually required either from the point of view of welfare-economic considerations (the mapping of household/family distributions into...

In recent times there has been a renewed interest in relationships between redistribution, growth and welfare. Land reforms have been central to strategies to improve the asset base of the poor in developing countries though their effectiveness has been hindered by political constraints on...

Even if individuals care about their current economic status, they are mainly concerned about the time they remain in it (its duration). The expected duration of an economic status affects how individuals perceive it and therefore, it should modify any economic policy aiming for Social Welfare...

This paper investigates possible explanations for the increases in inequality observed in Brazil during the 1980s. While the static decompositions of inequality by household characteristics reveal that education and race of the household head, as well as geographic location, can account for a...