The UN Millennium Development Goals have recognized poverty reduction as the main goal of global development policy. A comprehensive framework to evaluate the effectiveness of single policy measures and policy packages with respect to poverty reduction is still lacking, though. Policy evaluation...

Nonfarm activities generate on average about 60 percent of rural households? incomes in the eastern Himalayan region of India. This paper analyzes the determinants of participation in nonfarm activities and of nonfarm incomes across rural households. We present and explore an analytical...

China has experienced rapid economic growth and the recent Global Economic Projections 2004 by the World Bank suggest that there is a continuation of Chinese growth of at lest 7 to 8 percent (World Bank, 2003). Nevertheless, on the background of rapid growth came increasing regional disparities....

In this paper we investigate the relationship between economic growth and industrial pollution emissions in China using data for 112 major cities between 2001 and 2004. Using disaggregated data we separate FDI inflows from Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan from those of other foreign economies. We...

In this paper we analyze the decision of small and micro firms to formalize, i.e. to obtain business and other licenses in rural Indonesia. We use the rural investment climate survey (RICS) that comprises around 2500 non-farm rural enterprises in six Indonesian districts and analyze in an IV...

Indonesia is, what the World Development Report 2008 calls, a transforming country characterized by increasing rural-urban income disparities and high poverty rates. Bearing these facts in mind, it is striking how little is known about causes and mechanism of the underlying determinants of...

Exploiting Tangshan 1976 - the deadliest earthquake in the 20th century - as a source of exogenous variation, we estimate the cohort-specific effects of a historical shock on contemporary socio-economic outcomes. While cohorts born after the earthquake were considerably larger, the adverse...

As public policies seek to advance deployment of enhanced broadband infrastructure as a means of acquiring economic advantage, the issue has arisen of the extent that additional economic performance accrues from increases in headline bandwidth speed in locations that are physically remote from...

Pension schemes that redistribute money to the elderly have seen a remarkable surge in developing countries. To explain this phenomenon we build a political economy model of a Beveridgean pay-as-you-go social security system which incorporates family transfers driven by costs of non-compliance...

We raise the hypothesis that aid specifically targeted at economic infrastructure helps developing countries attract higher FDI inflows through improving their endowment with infrastructure in transportation, communication, energy and finance. By performing 3SLS estimations we explicitly account...