It is widely assumed that pervasive credit market failures mean that a person's current wealth is critical to whether or not that person can take up opportunities to start a new business. The authors show that inequality in wealth can be either good or bad for the level of entrepreneurship in an...

How much can India reduce poverty nationwide by manipulating the distribution of income between regions or sectors? What is the overall effect on the poor of targeting resources toward the poorer states of India - or toward the generally poorer rural sector. Given real constraints on policy...

In theory, it is possible that the persistent poverty that has emerged in many transition economies, is attributable to underlying, non-convexities in the dynamics of household incomes - such that a vulnerable household will never recover from a sufficiently large, but short-lived shock to its...

The authors used distribution data from 109 household surveys done since 1980 in 42 developing and transitional economies to find evidence that high rates of growth in average living standards are associated with higher rates of poverty reduction. The adverse distributional effect of recent...

Adjustment programs often emphasize protecting social spending - especially pro-poor spending - from cuts. Yet the incidence of fiscal contraction - and hence the case for action to protect public spending on the poor at a time of overall fiscal austerity - is an empirical question, which the...

The widely held view that larger families tend to be poorer in developing countries has influenced research and policies. But the basis for this"stylized fact"is questionable, the authors argue. Widely cited evidence of a strong negative correlation between size and consumption per person is...

This paper discusses the effect that changes in individual incomes have on aggregate undernutrition. Undernutrition depends not only on nutrient intakes but on other factors, including nutrient requirements - which may differ widely amongst people. The author offers an approach to measuring the...

The authors examine the distributional implications of selective compliance in sample surveys, whereby households with different incomes are not equally likely to participate. They discuss poverty and inequality measurement implications for monotonically decreasing and inverted-U...

The effects of public investments aimed at directly improving children's health are theoretically ambiguous, since the outcomes also depend on indirect effects through parental inputs. The authors investigate the role of such inputs in influencing the incidence of child health gains from access...

The decollectivization of agriculture in Vietnam was a crucial step in the country's transition to a market economy. But the assignment of land use rights had to be decentralized, and local cadres ostensibly had the power to corrupt this process. The authors assess the realized land...