No one doubts the good data are essential to sound policymaking. Alas, data are invariably faulty. Methodological solutions to data inadequacies have often been proposed and implemented, but they have been tested only rarely. Yet the methods that are used may well determine the direction of...

With the limited set of policy instruments typically available in the rural sectors of developing countries, imperfect coverage of the poor and leakage to the nonpoor must be expected from even the most well-intentioned poverty alleviation scheme, One way to reach the poor more effectively is to...

Workfare programs aim to reduce poverty by providing low-wage work to those who need it. They are often turned to in a crisis. This article offers some simple analytical tools that can be used to rapidly appraise the cost-effectiveness of an existing workfare operation as a basis for deciding...

Current knowledge provides little guidance on one of the key questions in evaluating public employment schemes aimed at directly reducing poverty: What are the net income gains to participating workers? This paper offers an answer for rural public employment in two villages in the state of...

We find that the distribution of income matters to aggregate carbon dioxide emissions and hence global warming. Higher inequality, both between and within countries is associated with lower carbon emissions at given average incomes. We also confirm that economic growth generally comes with...

Some years ago a consensus emerged in the development community on the idea of an international poverty line of around $1 a day at purchasing power parity. This became the focus of the first Millennium Development Goal (MDG), which calls for halving the 1990 $1 a day poverty rate by 2015. In a...

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In ?One Pager? No. 65, Sanjay Reddy says the World Bank is ?digging (itself) deeper into a hole? in measuring global poverty. It seems we are in this hole (in Reddy?s eyes) because we have not adopted his preferred method; I have tried to explain why we have not done so in past responses to Reddy...

Há alguns anos um consenso surgiu na comunidade em desenvolvimento acerca da idéia de uma linha da pobreza internacional por volta de 1 dólar diário com base na paridade do poder de compra. Este se tornou o foco do primeiro Objetivo de Desenvolvimento para o Milênio (ODM), que estabele a...