The targeting efficiency and the coverage of social programs for the poor are typically analyzed by partitioning the total population in four mutually exclusive groups: the poor who benefit from a program or policy, the poor who do not benefit, the non-poor who benefit, and the non-poor who do...

This paper shows how to take into account risk aversion when measuring poverty under income variability. An application to British panel data suggests that income and poverty comparisons between the self-employed and other groups of households are sensitive to assumptions on the degree of risk...

Income variablity is likely to increase wage inequality if poorer households are more vulnerable to shocks. Using a simple method to estimate risk-adjusted measures of wage inequality and data from Mexico, this note shows that safety nets could offset a good part of the impact of risk aversion...

Welfare comparisons may be sensitive to the assumptions made about economies of scale within households. This paper uses recent advances in sequential stochastic dominance techniques to show how to test for the robustness of poverty and housing quality comparisons to assumptions about economies...

Under price ceilings and quality floors for agricultural inputs in cash crop sectors in developing countries where credit markets are weak, imperfect information on the ability of farmers to pay for their inputs at the end of the cropping season may lead the decentralized production of those...

The evaluation of the impact on poverty of social programs depends on how other programs are treated in the analysis and on the assumptions used for estimating poverty measures. This paper applies a simple yet sound method for allocating between various programs the total poverty reduction...

The Gini income elasticity has been used to assess the impact of marginal proportional changes in income from a given source on inequality in total income. This note extends the methodology to take into account income variability.

Commodity producers in Africa often bene?t from guaranteed and relatively stable prices for their crops. This paper shows how to estimate the required increase in crop price necessary to o¤set the higher risk for farmers that price liberalization would entail due to large variations over time...

Welfare comparisons may be sensitive to the assumptions made about economies of scale within households. This paper uses recent advances in sequential stochastic dominance techniques to show how to test for the robustness of poverty and housing quality comparisons to assumptions about economies...