The World Bank prepares and publishes estimates of the number of poor people in the world. While everyone knows that these numbers should be taken with a pinch of salt, the numbers are arguably important. This paper discusses a number of problems with the current $1-a-day poverty counts, makes...

Although many governments in developing countries profess redistributive aims, and although standard efficiency arguments suggests that cash transfers are the best way of accomplishing such aims, direct cash transfers to the poor are rare. In this paper we examine a counter example, the "social...

I explore the connection between income inequality and health in both poor and rich countries. I discuss a range of mechanisms, including nonlinear income effects, credit restrictions, nutritional traps, public goods provision, and relative deprivation. I review the evidence on the effects of...

In this paper, I briefly review the literature on commodity prices as it touches on African economic development; fuller accounts are given in Gersovitz and Paxxon, Deaton and Miller and Collier and Gunning. In the next section, I provide some data that documents who exports what, and what has...

In this paper, we demonstrate that the empirical evidence is exactly the opposite of the theo-retical predictions. With total household expenditure per capita (PCE) held constant, expenditure per head on food falls with the number of heads. The result appears to be quite general; we find it not...

This paper reviews the evidence on growth and saving, considering various models in turn, and summarizing the extent to which they appear to be consistent with the facts. These reviews are necessarily brief, and apart from the first two sections, I focus on models of house-hold behavior that...

In our earlier work, we used data from the National Health Interview Survey (NHIS) to examine life-cycle patterns in health status and in the joint distribution of health status and income (Deaton and Paxson, 1998). In this paper we summarize and extend those results, and provide new evidence...