August 2000 - Between 1987 and 1998, the incidence of poverty fell in Asia and the Middle East and North Africa, changed little in Latin America and Sub-Saharan Africa, and rose in Eastern Europe and Central Asia. Too little economic growth in the poorest countries and persistent inequalities...

May 2000 - Existing methods for assessing latent country or institutional performance can yield deceptive results. There have been many attempts to infer latent performance attributes of governments (or other institutions) from conditional comparisons that control for observed variables. Success...

March 2000 - In subjective surveys, people who become ill or lose their jobs report reduced well-being, even if they later get a job. Perhaps their exposure to uninsured risk outside the formal employment sector reduces their expectations about future income. Do potential biases cloud the...

December 1999 - Nonfarm economic growth in India had very different effects on poverty in different states. Nonfarm growth was least effective at reducing poverty in states where initial conditions were poor in terms of rural development and human resources. Among initial conditions conducive to...

December 1999: Yes - and more efficiently by women than by men, according to this analysis of household survey data for Bangladesh. An illiterate adult earns significantly more in the nonfarm economy when living in a household with at least one literate member. According to theory, a member of a...

August 1999 - To minimize the harmful impact on poor people of macroeconomic shocks, sound policies for dealing with crises - and an adequate public safety net - should be in place before a crisis starts. Many developing countries faced macroeconomic shocks in the 1980s and 1990s. The impact of...

July 1999 - A workfare program was introduced in response to high unemployment in Argentina. An ex-post evaluation using matching methods indicates that the program generated sizable net income gains to generally poor participants. Jalan and Ravallion use propensity-score matching methods to...

April 1999 - As conventionally measured, current household income relative to a poverty line can only partially explain how Russian adults perceive their economic welfare. Other factors include past incomes, individual incomes, household consumption, current unemployment, risk of unemployment,...

December 1997 - In rural China, those in the poorest wealth decile are the least well-insured, with 40 percent of an income shock being passed on to current consumption. By contrast, consumption by the richest third of households is protected from almost 90 percent of an income shock. Jalan and...

The paper provides new measures of global poverty that take seriously the idea of relative-income comparisons but also acknowledge a deep identification problem when the latent norms defining poverty vary systematically across countries. Welfare-consistent measures are shown to be bounded below...