We review the origins of the dollar-a-day poverty line, discuss historical poverty and inequality trends, and forecast poverty rates until 2030 using a new fractional response approach. Three findings stand out. First, global poverty reduction since 1981 has been rapid but regional trends are...

Do remittances and social assistance have different impacts on household expenditure patterns While two separate strands of literature have looked at how social assistance or remittances have been spent, few studies have compared them directly. Using data from a nationally representative...

Forced migration, often resulting from violent conflict, imposes large economic costs on both sending and receiving countries, on those agencies that coordinate humanitarian services and most importantly upon the forced migrants themselves. Programs encouraging the return of refugees are...

This paper deals with the problem of selecting the unit of analysis in multidimensional poverty analyses, which is a central decision to take, both from academic and normative points of view. The paper compares the results of an individual-level Multidimensional Poverty Index for Chile,...

This paper uses a unique data set of the Human Development Index to describe long-run human development trends for 111 countries, from 1970 to 2005. The first part of the paper shows trends by region, period and index subcomponent. We find that 110 of the 111 countries show progress in their HDI...

Despite South Africa’s transition from apartheid in 1994, the social landscape is still fragmented along racial lines. However, South Africa has an impressive social grants system by international standards, with social assistance spending as a percentage of GDP comparing to Western European...

One of the most enduring relationships in economics is that proposed by Ernst Engel in 1857: “The poorer is a family, the greater is the proportion of the total outgo [family expenditures] which must be used for food. … The proportion of the outgo used for food, other things being equal is...

This study explores the influence of vulnerability on migration intentions within the context of Afghanistan. While it is commonplace to conceptualize migration as being driven by certain economic-related factors, it is reasonable to assume that in an insecure setting like Afghanistan the...

Two factors that have received limited attention in poverty dynamic studies are the role of risk in causing poverty mobility and attrition bias. Controlling for the attrition bias, we study poverty dynamics in urban Ethiopia with an emphasis on the effect of idiosyncratic shocks and informal...

The study explores the spatial patterns of poverty in Pakistan through two dimensions, asset accumulation and basic needs. For this purpose Pakistan Standard of Living Measurement 08-09 is employed to construct an Asset Index and a Basic Needs index, at a district level, through the use of...