The purpose of this study is to provide in one place a set of papers that were written at various points in time over the last four years on poverty and the response to the recent economic crisis in Liberia. More precisely, the objective of the study is twofold. First it is to provide a basic...

This report consists of a collection of case studies from Latin America combining qualitative and quantitative research methods for the analysis of poverty within a social exclusion framework. The first chapter provides an overview of the differences between quantitative and qualitative methods,...

While consumer utility subsidies are widespread in both the water and electricity sectors, their effectiveness in reaching and distributing resources to the poor is the subject of much debate. This publication brings together empirical evidence on subsidy performance across a wide range of...

The book, public finance for poverty reduction, includes a series of papers that were prepared in the context of a World Bank Institute (WBI) public finance The book, public finance for poverty reduction, includes a series of papers that were prepared in the context of a WBI public finance...

The most labour-intensive task in building a poverty profile consists in the estimation of the poverty lines. Does it matter whether poverty lines are estimated for the urban and rural sectors as a whole or by geographical area within each sector? Using a decomposition of the Gini index of...

Electricite de France, the French monopoly provider of electricity, has been testing a number of new policy instruments to avoid disconnection among its low income customers. This paper uses decentralization, a common feature of social programmes, to identify the impact of Electricite de...

Even without a comprehensive household survey with detailed consumption and income data, it is still often feasible to conduct useful empirical work on gender and intra-household allocations. This paper documents the extent to which income generation affects decision making within households in...

The objective of this paper is to provide a descriptive analysis of domestic work time in Sierra Leone using a 2003-2004 household survey that for the first time provides information on time use. Basic statistics on the time allocated to domestic work according to gender, age, urban/rural...

This report reviews recent trends in household access to infrastructure services and associated budgetary expenditures in Africa. It is based on a pooled database that draws upon the entire body of household surveys conducted in sub-Saharan Africa in the last 15 years.

This paper uses a recent, nationally representative household survey for the Republic of Congo—the 2005 ECOM (Enquête Congolaise auprès des Ménages) survey—to test the unitary model of household consumption. The study finds that a higher labor income share obtained by women does lead to a...