This paper develops a theory of employment guarantees when labor markets are imperfect and when the credibility of government policy announcements could be in doubt. The basic feature of an EGS is that any individual who satisfies a set of specified criteria is guaranteed public employment at a...

We investigate how vertical unity within a community interacts with horizontal class divisions of an unequal income distribution. Community is conceptualized in terms of a public good to which all those in the community have equal access, but from which outsiders are excluded. We formulate the...

The dominant perspective in discussions of labour and environmental standards and globalization is that of North-South competition and its impact on Northern standards. This Paper presents an alternative perspective, that of South-South competition to export to the North, and its impact on...

Both raw intuition and past experience suggest that the success of an employment guarantee scheme (EGS) in safeguarding the welfare of the poor depends both on the wage it promises, and the ease with which any worker can gain access. An EGS is thus at once a wage guarantee and a rationing...

The author gives examples of research recently published in professional journals that directly helped, or could help, in formulating policy advice (and perhaps even policymaking). An article by Younger (1992) was helpful in analyzing a problem in Ghana, where aid flows to government crowded out...

Is there a"Kuznets curve"for intra household inequality ? Does intra household inequality first increase, peak, and then decrease as the household becomes better off? The authors found both theoretical and tentative empirical support for this hypothesis. The policy significance of this finding...

History matters, and it matters in important and interesting ways for policy  today. But it is not just actual events in the past. It is how they are recorded, interpreted, ...

This paper adopts the “Rip Van Winkle” stratagem, of asking what differences would be noticed, in the domain of poverty and distribution, by someone who fell asleep in 1987 (the year I published my paper on poverty in the IMF Staff Papers, and woke up only in 2007 (the year I visited the IMF...

This paper raises a number of issues in thinking about and addressing the intergenerational transmission of disadvantage. Starting with choice subject to constraints by parents as determining outcomes for children, the paper identifies sequences of interventions to relieve “binding...