In 2002 Malawi experienced a serious shortage of cereals due to adverse climatic conditions. The World Food Programme assumed that about 2.1 to 3.2 million people were threatened of starvation at that time. However, not much research has been undertaken to investigate the actual consequences of...

The informal sector is typically characterized as being very heterogeneous and possibly composed of two clearly distinct segments, sometimes called the lower and upper tiers. However, empirical evidence shows that even among lower tier entrepreneurs profitability can be quite high. We combine...

Small-scale economic activities in the informal sector usually account for an important share of production in developing countries. Classical theories of structural change and economic growth assume that the modern sector would sooner or later absorb the workers employed in the informal sector....

We propose a new methodology for comparing poverty over multiple periods across time and space that does not arbitrarily aggregate income over various years or rely on arbitrarily specified poverty lines or poverty indices. Following Duclos et al. (2006a), we use the multivariate stochastic...

Microsimulation constitutes a particularly powerful instrument for evaluating the distributive impact of macro-economic shocks. All existing models applied to developing countries remain static. I develop a dynamic model able to account for the temporal dimension of macro-economic shocks and...

Previous poverty assessments for Burkina Faso were biased due to the neglect of some important methodological issues. This led to the so-called ‘Burkinabè Growth-Poverty-Paradox’, i.e. relatively sustained macro-economic growth, but almost constant poverty. We estimate that poverty...

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...

Burkina Faso has experienced quite significant aggregate growth over the past two decades, but that growth has not been transformed into poverty reduction. The key obstacles preventing large-scale escape from poverty are very high population growth combin

In low and middle income countries road traffic accident fatalities will become in the near future one of the three major causes of death. Given that in particular the active population accounts for these fatalities, the potential economic implications are large, on the micro and the macro...