This study addresses the question of how well Hungary's system of cash social transfers helps prevent or alleviate poverty -whether different types of social transfer, or changes in eligibility rules, might better alleviate poverty. The social safety net in Hungary and other transition economies...

Using recently completed"poverty maps"for Cambodia, Ecuador, and Madagascar, the authors simulate the impact on poverty of transferring an exogenously given budget to geographically defined subgroups of the population according to their relative poverty status. They find large gains from...

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...

In December 1999, the Boards of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund approved a new approach to their relations with low-income countries. The approach was centered around the development and implementation of Poverty Reduction Strategies (PRS), which are intended to be...

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...

A majority of the poor in Indonesia come from agricultural and self-employed households. Moreover, the largest single contribution to poverty reduction between 1990 and 1993 came from within-sector welfare gains to self-employed farm households. Data show that the role of the labor market in...

Despite the popularity and unique nature of women's self-help groups in India, evidence of their economic impacts is scant. Based on two rounds of a 2,400 household panel, the authors use double differences, propensity score matching, and pipeline comparison to assess economic impacts of longer...

Geographic targeting is perhaps the most popular mechanism used to direct social programs to the poor in Latin America. The author empirically compares geographic targeting indicators available in Peru. He combines household-level information from the 1994 and 1997 Peru Living Standards...

Differing value judgments in measuring inequality underlie the conflicting factual claims about how much poor people have shared in the economic gains from globalization. Opponents in the debate differ in the extent to which they care about relative inequality versus absolute inequality,...

Economists have relied heavily on household incomes or expenditures normalized for differences in household specific prices and demographics in their research and policy advice related to poverty and inequality. Recognizing the conceptual and empirical problems that confound such measures does...