Can self-assessed health be relied on to identify the true socioeconomic gradients in health status? The self-assessed health of Russian adults in 2002 shows remarkably little gradient with respect to economic welfare. The authors document this finding and assess its robustness to the...

Brazil's slow pace of poverty reduction over the last two decades reflects both low growth and a low growth elasticity of poverty reduction. Using GDP data disaggregated by state and sector for a twenty-year period, this paper finds considerable variation in the poverty-reducing effectiveness of...

Policy-oriented discussions often assume that"better targeting"implies larger impacts on poverty or more cost-effective interventions. The literature on the economics of targeting warns against that assumption, but evidence has been scarce. The paper begins with a critical review of the...

The authors examine the structure of poverty in Indonesia by sector of employment, and how it changed during the adjustment period, 1984 to 1987. They find that, while aggregate poverty decreased during the period, the gains to the poor were quite uneven across regions and sectors. Gains to the...

This paper shows how differences in aggregate human development outcomes over time and space can be additively decomposed into a pure economic-growth component, a component attributed to differences in the distribution of income, and components attributed to"non-income"factors and differences in...

Poor-area development programs- in which the government transfers extra resources to unusually poor areas -have been widely used to fight poverty. There has been some research on such programs, but little is known about their impact on household living standards over time. The authors address...

Liberalising key factor markets is a crucial step in the transition from a socialist control-economy to a market economy. However, the process can be stalled by imperfect information, high transaction costs and covert resistance from entrenched interests. The article studies agricultural land...