This paper reviews evidence on the impact of fuel subsidy reform on household welfare in developing countries. On average, the burden of subsidy reform is substantial and is approximately neutrally distributed across income groups; a $0.25 decrease in the per liter subsidy results in a 5%...

A common criticism of antipoverty programs is that the high share of administrative (nontransfer) costs substantially reduces their effectiveness. Yet there is surprisingly little rigorous empirical evidence on program costs. This study proposes and implements a replicable methodology for a...

This paper reviews evidence on the impact of fuel subsidy reform on household welfare in developing countries. On average, the burden of subsidy reform is neutrally distributed across income groups; a $0.25 decrease in the per liter subsidy results in a 6 percent decrease in income for all...

Commodity taxes have three distinct roles: (1) revenue collection, (2) interpersonal redistribution, and (3) resource allocation. The paper presents an integrated treatment of these three concerns in a second-best general equilibrium framework, which leads to the "generalized Ramsey rule" for...

Samuel Morley and David Coady demonstrate how a promising new alternative to standard donor-financed education programs--the conditioned transfer for education (CTE) program--can advance both poverty reduction and education goals at the same time. CTE programs meet the immediate needs of the...

A consistent set of economy-wide shadow prices for Pakistan is presented, based on input-utput flows for the mid-1970s. This provides broad parameters for policy at the sectoral level, with indications as to which sectors should be encouraged under alternative assumptions concerning the...

We study the effects of mass migration from Venezuela on Peruvian labor markets. In 2017–2018, about 870,000 Venezuelans migrated to Peru; about 84% settled in the Lima metropolitan area, where the percentage of Venezuelans in the working age population went from nil to over 10%. Migrants were...