Very poor people are often considered ignorant and even incapable of thinking, because they have had no opportunity to gain skill in expression through education. The experience of contempt and exclusion is deep among the poorest, whether they live in rich or poor countries, and it often...

Despite long working hours, for many household members, and especially women, underemployment is nevertheless affecting a large share of the population in many developing countries. Using data on time use, wages, and consumption levels from a recent household survey for Guinea, this paper...

The devaluation of the CFA Franc in 1994 generated a public investment boom in Senegal. The increase in public investment was made possible thanks to an improved budgetary situation related to the reduction in real terms of the public wage bill which had been too large for some time. The rise in...

Rwanda is facing a severe electricity crisis. Higher demand and production cost as well as a reduction in revenues in real terms have led to large operating losses for the electricity operator Electrogaz. In order to deal with this crisis, a doubling of electricity tariffs was recently approved,...

This short dissemination note provides a synthesis of key results from a recent study on access to infrastructure services in Africa. Using Demographic and Health Surveys from 22 countries that have conducted at least two such surveys between 1990 and 2005, we provide comparable estimates over...

Conflict and political instability have considerably weakened Guinea-Bissau’s productive infrastructure during the past three decades. This situation has contributed to an increase in the degree of vulnerability of the population, especially in rural areas. As growth has been weak, poverty...

Many private non-profit organizations play an active role assisting the poor. Those organizations often benefit from government subsidies, which makes it important to assess the benefits of their programs. This paper provides a statistical analysis of the characteristics of the clients of a...

At the time when this paper was written, the latest nationally representative survey implemented in Nigeria dated back to 1996, and the available estimations suggested that two thirds of the population was poor. This high level of poverty was due in large part to macroeconomic volatility that...

This paper provides a review of part of the literature on inequality and social welfare, with a special focus on the Gini index. The paper first presents the extended Gini index used for measuring inequality, as well as the source decomposition of the Gini used to analyze how changes in income...

Evidence for Malawi and other developing countries suggests the existence of labor shortages at the peak of the cropping season, with negative impacts on the ability of households to make the most of their endowments such as land. At the same time, for most of the year, there is substantial...