Since the 1994 devaluation, growth has been quite strong in Mali (about 5% p.a. on average), but much weaker in terms of GDP per person (about 2.6% p.a.) due to a very high index of fecundity. Growth is still very unstable, due to a large share of agriculture in GDP and very sensitive to...

The theoretical literature on pro-poor growth as well as its applications have not paid sufficient attention to the issue of varying inflation rates across the income distribution. Ignoring inflation inequality in pro-poor growth measurements can however severely bias assessments of pro-poor...

Since the 1994 devaluation, growth has been quite strong in Mali (about 5%), but much weaker in terms of GDP per person (about 2.6%) due to a very high index of fecundity (6.8). Growth is still very unstable, due to a large share of agriculture in GDP (40%) and very sensitive to rainfall and...

There is an ongoing debate among researchers and policy makers, whether informal sector employment is a result of competitive market forces or labor market segmentation. More recently it has been argued that none of the two theories sufficiently explains informal employment, but that the...

It has been recently argued that the informal sector of the labor market in a developing economy shows a dual structure with one part of it being competitive to the formal sector and another part being the result of market segmentation. To test this hypothesis we formulate an econometric model...

Previous poverty assessments of Burkina Faso neglected some important methodological issues. They were therefore misleading and led to the so-called 'Burkinabè Growth--Poverty Paradox', i.e., increasing poverty despite sustained macro-economic growth and constant inequality. We estimate that...

The numerous proposed measures of multi-period poverty and vulnerability have until now not taken into account the insights from behavioral economics. In this paper we argue that recent evidence on individuals' decision making is of high relevance for the measurement of poverty when switching...

On July 7, 2005, the Faculty of Economics of the University of Göttingen awarded Nobel Prize winning economist Amartya Sen with an honorary doctorate in economics in recognition of his outstanding contributions to the fields of welfare and development economics. On the occasion of the award,...

We examine the determinants of the number of attendees and questions and comments in parallel sessions at a large economics conference. We use the annual meeting of the German economics association in 2012 in G ttingen as an empirical case study. We find that the place (close to the coffee and...