Relative deprivation (RD), also known as relative poverty, an idea implicitly put forward by Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations and formally conceptualized by Runciman (1966), refers to the discontent people feel when they compare their positions to others and realize that others in the group...

This paper uses two comparable data sets from South Africa to examine the effect of household characteristics on poverty and living standards and how they have changed over the five years following the dismantling of apartheid. I find that while things have started showing signs of improvement,...

The time parents devote to caring for their children is an enormous and under-appreciated component of society's investment in human capital. These investments may be at risk mainly due to the growing proportion of women entering the labor market. This paper investigates the determinants of...

Having declared health as a major security concern, the World Health Organisation has urged all member-countries to look at the growing interdependence between health and security and invest generously in the heath sector to build a safer future. It is true that India is progressing but there is...

This paper examines the effect of adult literacy program participation on household consumption in Ghana. The adult literacy programs in Ghana are of special interest since they are more comprehensive than standard literacy programs and incorporate many additional topics. We use community fixed...

Using countrywide household surveys from 2003 and 2005, Afghan rural households are shown to have a variety of sources of income, including a pervasive incidence of wages and remittances, and a thorough monetization of their economies, in which payments in kind and other non-monetary relations...

This paper presents information not previously published about cereal self-sufficiency and marketable surplus among Afghan farmers, based on extensive survey work carried out in 2003 across the whole country. Year after year, even in a very good agricultural year, like 2003, most Afghan farmers...

Some advocates worry that stronger child support enforcement may increase domestic violence. The predictions of a simple economic model are ambiguous; stronger enforcement may increase the mother's bargaining power, which reduces violence, but may also increase the father's opportunity and...

In this paper I exploit the fact that the social and economic reforms over the past two decades differentially affected the opportunity costs of non-participation in work, welfare, and disability programs for single mothers across different birth-year and education cohorts. This cohort variation...

In this paper we test whether increasing child allowances will affect the intra-household allocation of consumption, measured by child and adult goods, holding total household resources constant. Our analysis is based on household survey data collected in Romania, where cash payments are made to...