Existing empirical evidence indicates that remittances have a positive impact on a good number of development indicators of recipient countries. Yet when flows are too large relative to the size of the recipient economies, as those observed in a number of Latin American countries, they may also...

Econometric analysis has established a negative relationship between labor supply and remittances in Jamaica. The authors incorporate this ex-post evidence in a general equilibrium model to investigate economywide effects of increased remittance inflows. In this model, remittances reduce labor...

Policies and external shocks affecting agriculture, the main source of income for rural households, can be expected to have a significant impact on poverty. The authors study the case of Uganda. Throughout the 1990s, more than 90 percent of its poor lived in rural areas and, during the same...

The growing economic fissures in the societies of Europe and Central Asia between generations, between insiders and outsiders in the labor market, between rural and urban communities, and between the super-rich and everyone else, are threatening the sustainability of the social contract. The...

Using household data from the Russian Longitudinal Monitoring Survey, this paper assesses how aging affects saving. To overcome a systematic bias against the life-cycle hypothesis of survey data, the paper estimates how the age profile of saving changes when the micro data are corrected to...

The halving of oil prices, which happened in a short period between late 2014 and the first months of 2015, has generated major terms of trade losses for oil exporting countries. Even if the oil producing sector normally employs a small group of workers and oil export revenues tend to be...

This paper assesses the potential impacts of the removal of agricultural and other trade distortions using a newly developed dataset and methodological approach for evaluating the global poverty and inequality effects of policy reforms. It finds that liberalization of agriculture will increase...

This paper examines the implications of providing care to elderly parents for adult children's retirement plans using microdata from a Japanese survey. We find no significant effect of caregiving on family caregivers' planned retirement age if we do not take into account caregiving intensity but...

This paper examines the intergenerational transmission of educational attainment using data on Japan. By exploiting unique information on whether children have ever given up schooling for financial reasons and, if they have, which level of schooling they have forgone, it attempts to assess the...