Very few of the (many) aid-financed rural road projects in developing countries have been the subject of rigorous impact evaluations. Assessing the welfare impacts of rural roads poses a number of problems, with implications for data collection and evaluation methods. This paper surveys the...

Poor rural women in the developing world spend considerable time collecting water. Do women living in places 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 be worse? We use...

The policy reforms called for in the transition from a socialist command economy to a developing market economy bring both opportunities and risks to a country's citizens. In poor economies, the initial focus of reform efforts is naturally the rural sector, which is where one finds the bulk of...

If the gains from investment depend on knowledge, but households cannot hire skills, then poorly educated households will achieve lower returns than educated ones. If the income-poor are less well educated, then they will also have lower returns to investment. The paper tests this argument for...

How much economic mobility is there across generations in a poor, primarily rural, economy? How much do intergenerational linkages contribute to current inequality? We address these questions using original survey data on Senegal that include an individualized measure of consumption. While...

We show how differences in aggregate human development outcomes over time and space can be additively decomposed into a pure mean income (growth) component, a component attributed to differences in the distribution of income, and components attributed to 'non-income' factors and differences in...

India’s 2005 National Rural Employment Guarantee Act creates a justiciable 'right to work' by promising up to 100 days of wage employment per year to all rural households whose adult members volunteer to do unskilled manual work. Work is provided in public works projects at the stipulated...