The conventional wisdom in mainstream development policy circles is that income transfers to the poor, and safety net policies more generally, are at best a short-term palliative and at worst a waste of money. They are not seen as a core element of an effective long-term poverty reduction...

Institutional features of the African setting -- large extended families and imperfect credit and land markets -- matter to the equity and efficiency roles played by intergenerational linkages. Using original survey data on Senegal that include an individualized measure of consumption, this...

Word searches of Google's library of digitized books suggest that there have been two"Poverty Enlightenments"since 1700, one near the end of the 18th century and the second near the end of the 20th. The historical literature suggests that only the second came with a widespread belief that...

There has been a growing interest in what have come to be termed"multidimensional indices of poverty."Advocates for these new indices correctly point out that command over market goods is not all that matters to peoples'well-being, and that other factors need to be considered when quantifying...

The inferences drawn from the most widely used regression models of subjective welfare are subject to a “frame-of-reference bias,” stemming from non-ignorable heterogeneity in subjective scales, such as what it means to be “rich” or “poor.” To test for this bias, respondents in...

The traditional approach to poverty measurement puts no explicit weight on success at increasing the typical level of living of the poorest—raising the consumption floor. To address this deficiency, the paper defines and measures the expected value of the floor, allowing for transient effects...

India’s 2005 National Rural Employment Guarantee Act creates a justiciable 'right to work' by promising up to 100 days of wage employment per year to all rural households whose adult members volunteer to do unskilled manual work. Work is provided in public works projects at the stipulated...

The 20th Human Development Report introduced a new version of its famous Human Development Index (HDI), which aggregates country-level attainments in life expectancy, schooling and income. The main change was to relax the past assumption of perfect substitutability between its components. Most...