Unlike most developing countries, consistent poverty measures for India can be tracked over a long time. The authors used 20 household surveys for rural India for the years 1958-90 to measure the effects of agricultural growth on rural poverty and on the rural labor market and to find out how...

The authors provide estimates of poverty at the regional level in India, spanning the 1990s. Such estimates have not been previously available due to concerns regarding non-comparability of the 1993-94 and 1999-2000 National Sample Survey Organization (NSSO) household survey data. They implement...

Indonesia's labor markets, especially on the island of Java, have been transformed in the past 30 years, especially since liberalization picked up speed in the mid-1980's. The author explores the regional dimensions of that transformation. In some other countries, when labor markets changed,...

Are the household characteristics that are good for transition to a more diversified market-oriented development process in Vietnam also important for reducing poverty? Or are there tradeoffs? The determinants of both poverty incidence and participation in rural off-farm activities are modeled...

There have been many attempts to infer latent performance attributes of governments (or other institutions) from conditional comparisons that control for observed variables. Success in doing do could greatly improve government performance. The author critically reviews the econometric...

Countries receiving debt relief under the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries initiative will be among the first to benefit from the new World Bank -- International Monetary Fund approach to strengthening the impact on poverty of concessional assistance in low-income countries. The new approach...

The authors characterize poverty in Sri Lanka, using data from two recent household surveys (for 1985-86 and1990-91). Poverty rates in 1990-91 were highest in the rural sector and lowest in the estate sector, with the urban sector in between. Between 1985-86 and 1990-91, national poverty...

The authors analyze and compare sectoral growth in three African economies - Cote d'Ivoire, Ghana and Zimbabwe - since 1965. They extend the classic dual economy - the agriculture and industry sectors - by adding the services sector. For all the three countries, they find at least one...

The authors examine whether financial development boosts the growth of small firms more than large firms and hence provides information on the mechanisms through which financial development fosters aggregate economic growth. They define an industry's technological firm size as the firm size...