In a data set for developing, and transition economies, the author finds that private consumption per capita, based on national accounts, deviates on average from mean household income,or expenditure based on national sample surveys. Growth rates also differ systematically, so that the ratio of...

The authors try to determine whether children sent to work in rural Bangladesh are caught in a poverty trap, with the extra income to poor families from child labor coming at the expense of the children's longer-term prospects of escaping poverty through education. The poverty trap argument...

It seems natural to expect the rich to oppose policies to redistribute income from the rich to the poor, and the poor to favor such policies. But this may be too simple a model, say the Authors. Expectations of future welfare may come into play. Well-off people on a downward trajectory may well...

In the last year or so, markedly different claims have been heard within the development community about just how much progress is being made against poverty and inequality in the current period of"globalization."Ravallion provides a nontechnical overview of the conceptual and methodological...

The author critically reviews the methods available for the ex-post counterfactual analysis of programs that are assigned exclusively to individuals, households, or locations. The discussion covers both experimental and non-experimental methods (including propensity-score matching, discontinuity...

Paradoxically, when economists analyze a policy's impact on welfare they typically assume that people are the best judges of their own welfare, yet resist directly asking them if they are better off. Early ideas of"utility"were explicitly subjective, but modern economists generally ignore...

It has been argued that inequality should be of little concern in poor countries on the grounds that (1) absolute poverty in terms of consumption (or income) is the overriding issue in poor countries, and (2) the only thing that really matters to reducing absolute income poverty is the rate of...

The immediate welfare costs of an economywide crisis can be high, but are there also lasting impacts? And are they greater in some geographic areas than others? The authors study Indonesia’s severe financial crisis of 1998. They use 10 national surveys spanning 1993–2002, each covering...

The paper examines the ways in which recent economic growth has been uneven in China and India and what this has meant for inequality and poverty. Drawing on analyses based on existing household survey data and aggregate data from official sources, the authors show that growth has indeed been...

Instead of targeting poor areas, should poverty programs target households with personal attributes that foster poverty, no matter where they live? Possibly not. There may be hidden constraints on mobility, or location may reveal otherwise hidden householdattributes. Using survey data for...