This paper examines the effects of risk-induced welfare variability on the expected value of a broad class of stochastic poverty measures. Theoretical conditions are derived for an increase in shared risk to increase expected poverty. The approach is applied to panel data for three villages in...

The widely held view that larger families tend to be poorer in developing countries has influenced research and policy. The scope for size economies in consumption cautions against this view. We find that the correlation between poverty and size vanishes in Pakistan when the size elasticity of...

Argentina's Proempleo Experiment, conducted in 1998–2000, was designed to assess whether a wage subsidy and specialized training could assist the transition from workfare to regular work. Randomly sampled workfare participants in a welfare-dependent urban area were given a voucher that...

We show how differences in aggregate human development outcomes over time and space can be additively decomposed into a pure mean income (growth) component, a component attributed to differences in the distribution of income, and components attributed to ‘non-income’ factors and...

Countries are increasingly being ranked by some new “mashup index of development,” defined as a composite index for which existing theory and practice provides little or no guidance for its design. Thus the index has an unusually large number of moving parts, which the producer is...

Brazil, China, and India have seen falling poverty in their reform periods, but to varying degrees and for different reasons. History left China with favorable initial conditions for rapid poverty reduction through market-led economic growth; at the outset of the reform process there were many...

This discussion paper resulted in an article in the <I>Journal of Economic Psychology</I> (2003). Volume 24(1), pages 17-33.<P> Public action to prevent crime is often driven by concerns about public safety. But what generatesthose concerns ? ]s it crime, or something else ? Using survey data for Brazil,...</p></i>