This paper examines to what extent gender gaps in education, health, employment, productive assets and inputs can affect pro poor growth (in the sense of increasing monetary incomes of the poor). After discussing serious methodological problems with examining gender issues in the context of an...

This paper analyses the determinants of transport costs for intra-Latin American trade over a period of six years (1999-2004). The data refer to yearly disaggregated (SITC 5 digit level) maritime trade flows on 277 trade routes. With this data set, a transport costs equation is estimated using...

This paper contributes towards the growing debate concerning the world distribution of income and its evolution over that past three to four decades. Our methodological approach is twofold. First, we formally test for the number of modes in a cross-sectional analysis where each country is...

This paper compares the standard economic welfare approach to poverty measurement to the empirical approaches proposed in the capability literature under the special focus of their suitability for operational poverty assessment, i.e. targeting and outreach evaluation. We question whether the...

We use several well-being measures that combine average income with a measure of inequality to undertake intertemporal and global comparisons of well-being. The conclusions emerging from the intertemporal analysis are that the impact of these measures on temporal trends in well-being is...

There is a well-known debate about the roles of geography versus institutions in explaining the long-term development of countries. These debates have usually been based on cross-country regressions where questions about parameter heterogeneity, unobserved heterogeneity, and endogeneity cannot...

We examine how macroeconomic performance, mainly in the role of high rates of inflation, affected earnings inequality in the 1980s and early 1990s in Brazil. The results–based initially on national timeseries, and then on the relatively novel sub-national panel time-series T N data and...

This case study examines to what extent Bolivia has been able to achieve pro-poor growth, what the mechanisms of achieving (or failing to achieve) pro-poor growth have been, and what options are available to ensure higher rates of pro-poor growth. The analysis focuses on the period from 1989 to...

In the absence of reliable and exhaustive income data, Proxy Means Tests (PMTs) are frequently employed as a cost-eective way to identify income-poor beneciaries of targeted anti-poverty programs. However, their usefulness depends on whether proxies accurately identify the income poor. Based on...