As the financial crisis has spread through the world, the lack of real-time data has made it difficult to track its impact in developing countries. This paper uses a micro-simulation approach to assess the poverty and distributional effects of the crisis in the Philippines. The authors find...

National poverty lines vary greatly across the world, from under $1 per person per day to over $40 (at 2005 purchasing power parity). What accounts for these huge differences, and can they be understood within a common global definition of poverty? For all except the poorest countries, the...

The Government of Cameroon has declared poverty reduction through strong and sustainable economic growth the central objective of its socioeconomic policy. This paper uses available household survey data to assess the performance of the economy with respect to this objective over the period...

This paper reviews the empirical evidence on the existence of poverty traps, understood as self-reinforcing mechanisms through which poor individuals or countries remain poor. Poverty traps have captured the interest of many development policy makers, because poverty traps provide a...

There is substantial research about cross section and time series correlations between economic growth and various economic, social, demographic and political variables. After analyzing these correlations, the paper makes the following conclusions. Exogenous increases do not seem to cause...

Indonesia's economic crisis has caused a consumption expenditures deterioration in the welfare of Indonesians. Focusing on only one dimension of individual, and family welfare - consumption expenditures - the authors analyze two issues associated with the measurement of poverty. The first issue...

The authors assess the developing world's progress in reducing absolute-consumption poverty during 1981-91, using new data on the distribution of household consumption or income per capita for 40 countries (at two points in time for 18 of the countries). They apply dominance tests to the...

Telling a policy maker that poverty will increase due to the recent increase in food prices is not very useful; telling the policy makers where the impact is likely to be larger is better, so that measures to cope with the impact of the crisis can be targeted to areas that need them the most....

Comparisons of poverty - indicating where or when poverty is greatest, for example - typically matter far more to policy choices than aggregate poverty measures, such as how many people are deemed"poor."So the author's examine how measurement practices affect empirical poverty profiles. They...

The authors empirically examine the determinants of remittance flows at the cross-country level. They consider, among other things, the significance of the level of migration, the education level of migrants, and financial sector development in determining remittances. Given the potential...