This paper assesses the impact of the steadily growing remittance flows to sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). Though the region receives only a small portion of the total recorded remittances to developing countries, and the volume of aid flows to SSA swamps remittances, this paper finds that...

Recent studies on the relationship between financial development and poverty have been inconclusive. Some claim that, by allowing more entrepreneurs to obtain financing, financial development improves the allocation of capital, which has a particularly large impact on the poor. Others argue that...

This paper evaluates a microsimulation technique by comparing the simulated outcome of a program with its actual effect. The ex ante evaluation is carried out for a conditional cash transfer program, where poor households were given money if the children attended school. A model of occupational...

Over the past decades, workers' remittances have grown to become one of the largest sources of financial flows to developing countries, often dwarfing other widely-studied sources such as private capital and official aid flows. While it is undeniable that remittances have poverty-alleviating and...

While many have celebrated India's accelerating economic growth, some have expressed concern about the distributional impacts of the growth process. Cognizant of the vulnerability of its large population below poverty, India's authorities have made faster and more inclusive economic growth the...

This primer aims to provide IMF macroeconomists with the essential information they need to address issues concerning health sector policy, particularly when they have significant macroeconomic implications. Such issues can also affect equity and growth and are fundamental to any strategy of...

Do the short and medium term adjustment costs associated with trade liberalization influence schooling and child labor decisions? We examine this question in the context of India's 1991 tariff reforms. Overall, in the 1990s, rural India experienced a dramatic increase in schooling and decline in...

Growth is pro-poor if the poverty measure of interest falls. This implies three potential sources of pro-poor growth: (a) a high rate of growth of average incomes; (b) a high sensitivity of poverty to growth in average incomes; and (c) a poverty-reducing pattern of growth in relative incomes. I...

This article investigates how financial development helps to reduce poverty directly through the McKinnon conduit effect and indirectly through economic growth. The results obtained with data for a sample of developing countries from 1966 through 2000 suggest that the poor benefit from the...

We develop a simple macroeconomic model that assesses the effects of higher foreign aid on output growth and other macroeconomic variables, including the real exchange rate. The model is easily tractable and requires estimation of only a few basic parameters. It takes into account the impact of...