At the time when this paper was written, the latest nationally representative survey implemented in Nigeria dated back to 1996, and the available estimations suggested that two thirds of the population was poor. This high level of poverty was due in large part to macroeconomic volatility that...

This paper provides a review of part of the literature on inequality and social welfare, with a special focus on the Gini index. The paper first presents the extended Gini index used for measuring inequality, as well as the source decomposition of the Gini used to analyze how changes in income...

Evidence for Malawi and other developing countries suggests the existence of labor shortages at the peak of the cropping season, with negative impacts on the ability of households to make the most of their endowments such as land. At the same time, for most of the year, there is substantial...

One of the most difficult tasks in preparing a poverty reduction strategy consists in setting priorities for public action, taking into account the cost of social programs and the capacity of the government to pay that cost. The ability to pay for social programs is determined by the resources...

This paper presents some analytical techniques to help policymakers gauge the technical and fiscal feasibility of development targets. While each of the techniques discussed below has deficiencies, taken together they have proven very useful in providing a sense of realism to target setting. The...

This paper provides a review of part of the literature on inequality and social welfare, with a special focus on the Gini index. The paper first presents the extended Gini index used for measuring inequality, as well as the source decomposition of the Gini used to analyze how changes in income...

For many years the government of Mexico has implemented a large training program for the unemployed. The program has been evaluated twice before with similar methodologies. These two evaluations yielded encouraging results in that the program apparently reduces unemployment and increases...

Budget constraints faced by governments in developing countries imply that the targeting performance of public subsidies and social programs (whether the subsidies are provided in cash or in kind) is important for reducing poverty. In this paper, we analyze the distributional properties of the...

One of the aspects of the orphan crisis in Sub-Saharan Africa relates to time use, namely where orphans end up living and what they spend their time doing in their new household of adoption. While some orphans are welcomed in centres and institutions, many live with relatives or other members of...

This paper serves as a brief introduction and overview for a volume that provides a set of six case studies from West Africa in order to contribute to an assessment of the benefits of growth (or the cost of a lack of growth) for poverty reduction in those countries. The first part of the volume...