The extent to which local communities benefit from commodity booms has been subject to wide but inconclusive investigations. This paper draws from a new district-level database to investigate the local impact on socioeconomic outcomes of mining activity in Peru, which grew almost twentyfold in...

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...

This paper compares for 13 Latin American countries the poverty and inequality impacts of cash transfer programs that are given to all children and the elderly (that is, categorical transfers), to programs of equal budget that are confined to the poor within each population group (that is,...

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...

Using two-step system-GMM on a panel data of 105 economies over the period 1987-2016, we present formal statistical evidence that Federalism is a strong predictor of greater income inequality in developing economies. It is also a strong predictor of higher poverty incidence and poverty severity...

We provide an explanation of the low willingness to save that is observed in many poor countries. Our explanation is based on the hypothesis that people have an over-optimistic outlook. As discussed in the psychological literature, an illusionary positive view of the future may be a good thing....

This paper aims to depict the post-Second World War poverty and inequality trends in Asia, its sub-regions, and individual economies. Efforts are made to explain these trends and explore the interrelationship between growth, poverty, and inequality in Asia. Analytical results confirm significant...

This study takes as its starting point what Gunnar Myrdal had to say about Viet Nam in the context of his seminal work, Asian Drama: An Inquiry into the Poverty of Nations, published in 1968. Myrdal pointed to the decisive nature of the Vietnamese people; and subsequent developments, which are...

We investigate the evolution of global welfare in two dimensions: income per capita and life expectancy. First, we estimate the marginal distributions of income and life expectancy separately. More importantly, in contrast to previous univariate approaches, we consider income and life expectancy...