While most economists assume that aid is fungible, most aid donors behave as if it is not. The authors study recipient government responses to development project aid in the context of a specific World Bank-financed project. They estimate the impact of a rural road rehabilitation project in...

Indonesia has made great progress during the past fifteen years in enhancing the command of the poor over privately provided goods, such as food, clothing, and housing. Has similar progress been made in improving their access to publicly provided social services? The article looks at how the use...

If the marginal gains from investment in physical capital depend positively on knowledge, but a household cannot hire skilled labor to compensate for low skills, then even if it has access to credit, the household will achieve lower returns than an educated household. If, as is common, the...

Routine"quick-and-dirty"methods of project appraisal can be so dirty in guiding project selection as to wipe out the net social gains from public investment, contend the authors, illustrating their point with a case study of irrigation projects in Vietnam. They test a common quick-and-dirty...

In the absence of household level data on participation in public programs, spending allocations and poverty measures across regions of Morocco are used to infer incidence across poor and non-poor groups and to decompose incidence within rural and urban areas separately, as well as to decompose...

The author examines how rural road investment projects should be selected and appraised when the objective is poverty reduction. After critically reviewing past and current practices, the author develops an operational approach grounded in a public economics framework in which concerns of equity...

Public spending aims to promote efficiency and equity. This paper, drawn from a book on public spending and the poor, is concerned with the latter. In it, the author focuses on three key questions: what is the welfare objective? how are the benefits of public spending currently distributed? how...

How does Vietnam's public safety net affect outcomes for the poor? Although social welfare programs in Vietnam are centrally mandated, they are locally implemented according to local norms and local poverty standards and often rely heavily on local financing. The author examines the coverage,...

Public spending programs aimed at alleviating poverty can either be broadly targeted at categories of spending or narrowly targeted at types of people. Each approach has benefits and costs to the poor. It is often claimed that narrow targeting of the poor will allow governments to reduce poverty...