The Poverty Reduction Strategy of the Government of Rwanda seeks to unlock the growth and poverty reduction potential of the tea sector through the privatization of tea estates. This paper uses the logic of causal inference and data from the 2004 Quantitative Baseline Survey of the tea sector to...

Who benefits from public spending? Who bears the burden of taxation? How desirable is the distribution of net benefits from the operation of a tax-benefit system? This paper surveys basic concepts, methods, and modeling approaches commonly used to address these issues in the context of fiscal...

The difficulties faced by many developing countries in raising revenue from direct taxes have forced them to rely heavily on indirect taxes to finance development interventions. The purpose of this paper is to show how to identify socially desirable options for commodity taxation in the context...

As crude oil prices reach new highs, there is renewed concern about how external shocks will affect growth and poverty in developing countries. This paper describes a macro-micro framework for examining the structural and distributional consequences of a significant external shock-an increase in...

Effective development policymaking creates a need for reliable methods of assessing effectiveness. There should be, therefore, an intimate relationship between effective policymaking and impact analysis. The goal of a development intervention defines the metric by which to assess its impact,...

Poverty reduction has become a fundamental objective of development, and therefore a metric for assessing the effectiveness of various interventions. Economic growth can be a powerful instrument of income poverty reduction. This creates a need for meaningful ways of assessing the poverty impact...

The importance of distributional issues in policymaking creates a need for empirical tools to assess the social impact of economic shocks and policies. This paper reviews some of the modeling approaches that are currently in use at the World Bank and other international financial institutions....

Developing countries face a host of macroeconomic challenges in the design and implementation of development strategies and policies. The importance of the underlying poverty and distributional issues creates a need for relevant and reliable ways of tracking the social impact of shocks and...

Poverty reduction has emerged as a fundamental social objective of development, and has become a metric commonly used to assess the performance of public policy. This paper adapts the methodology of Firpo, Fortin and Lemieux (2009) [2009. "Unconditional Quantile Regressions.” Econometrica 77...

Recent economic literature on pro-poor growth measurement is drawn together, using a common analytical framework which lends itself to some significant extensions. First, a new class of pro-poorness measures is defined, to complement existing classes, with similarities and differences which are...