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 Ravallion test...

Can location make the difference between growth and contraction in living standards for otherwise identical households? Apparently so. Evidence of spatial poverty traps strengthens the case for investing in the geographic capital of poor people. Can place of residence make the difference between...

The authors study transient poverty in a six-year panel dataset for a sample of 5,000 households in post-reform rural China. Half of the mean squared poverty gap is transient, in that it is directly attributable to fluctuations in consumption over time. There is enough transient poverty to...

Are development programs targeted to poor areas merely short-term palliatives, or do they yield longer-term gains? Poor-area development programs - in which the government transfers extra resources to unusually poor areas - have been widely used to fight poverty. There has been some research on...

Income gains from participation in economic programs are estimated as the difference between income with the program and that without it. The "with" data can be collected without much difficulty. But the "without" data are fundamentally unobserved, since an individual cannot be both a...

Are the determinants of chronic and transient poverty different? Do policies that reduce transient poverty also reduce chronic poverty? The authors decompose measures of household poverty into chronic and transient components and use censored conditional quantile estimators to investigate the...