India's huge expansion in rural electrification in the 1980s and 1990s offers lessons for other countries today. The paper examines the long-term effects of household electrification on consumption, labor supply, and schooling in rural India over 1982-99. It finds that household electrification...

In 2005 India introduced an ambitious national anti-poverty program, now called the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme. The program offers up to 100 days of unskilled manual labor per year on public works projects for any rural household member who wants such work at the...

Public knowledge about India's ambitious Employment Guarantee Scheme is low in one of India's poorest states, Bihar, where participation is also unusually low. Is the solution simply to tell people their rights? Or does their lack of knowledge reflect deeper problems of poor people's agency and...

The transformation of work during China’s rapid economic development is associated with a substantial but little noticed re-allocation of traditional farm labor among women, with some doing much less and some much more. This paper studies how the work, time allocation, and health of...

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...

Purpose – International organizations pursue multiple objectives in hiring policies including cultural diversity, reducing costs and avoiding discrimination among which there can be sharp trade‐offs. The paper has the purpose of studying how these trade‐offs are resolved in the World...

In the developing world, poor rural women and their children spend considerable time collecting water. Do women living in areas where more time is needed for water collection tend to participate less in income-earning, market-based activities? Do the education outcomes of their children tend to...

Are the household characteristics that are good for the transition to a more diversified market-oriented economy in Vietnam also important for reducing poverty? Or are there trade-offs? The determinants of both poverty incidence and participation in rural off-farm activities are modeled as...