From 1995 to 2005, the average urban household savings rate in China rose by 7 percentage points, to about one-quarter of disposable income. Savings rates increased across all demographic groups, and the age profile of savings has an unusual pattern in recent years, with younger and older...

This paper explores the relationship between country-level skills and enterprise-level training, and the association of these with economic performance and enterprise behaviour. Country-level data on the quality of human capital, taken from several surveys conducted by the IEA and OECD during...

Low-income households spend a substantial share of their income on utility services such as electricity, heating and water. The difficulty these socially vulnerable consumers have in affording further tariff increases is often used as an argument against tariff reform. However, detailed...

We conducted experiments in Vietnamese villages to determine the predictors of risk and time preferences. In villages with higher mean income, people are less loss-averse and more patient. Household income is correlated with patience but not with risk. We expand measurements of risk and time...

I discuss the measurement of world poverty and inequality, with particular attention to the role of purchasing power parity (PPP) price indexes from the International Comparison Project. Global inequality increased with the latest revision of the ICP, and this reduced the global poverty line...

Transition has led to a significant increase in the severity and incidence of poverty in Eastern Europe. One important aspect of poverty is access to, and the affordability of, basic services like electricity,heat and water. This paper provides evidence on this issue from the Ukraine...

This paper presents an account of the environment faced by entrepreneurs in Russia. In section one we give a brief introduction to the country which is followed by the overview of a public policy on small and medium enterprises in the next section. The current state of SMEs and some...

We investigate the long-term effects of the important presence of Jews in Eastern Europe before the Second World War and their disappearance during the Holocaust. The Pale of Settlement, the area which Jewish residents were confined to in the Russian Empire, is used as a source of exogenous...

With fortuitously timed data – collected before, during and after a major macro-financial crisis in Bulgaria – we revisit several hypotheses in the economics and nutritional literature related to the tendency of households to smooth their nutritional status over time. We explore the dietary...

El presente documento busca de manera indicativa explicitar algunos elementos conceptuales y prácticos para construir el problema acerca del tema, pues la diversidad de ángulos desde donde se lo aborda da la impresión de que el problema mismo no está conceptualizado de manera homogénea. En...