South Africa has a relatively well-developed social protection system for a middle-income country. Despite its roots in the country's racially discriminatory past, the system has been repurposed post-apartheid to address deep poverty and severe inequality. This paper explores key characteristics...

Road infrastructure boosts economic opportunities and thus contributes to poverty alleviation. This paper investigates the causal impact of paved primary roads on poverty and income mobility in Ecuador, with particular attention to the mechanisms through which these effects materialize....

This study examines the career aspirations of economically disadvantaged Filipino children participating in the Pantawid Pamilyang Pilipino Program (4Ps), the Philippines' flagship conditional cash transfer program. Using data from 9,958 children aged 10 to 25 collected through the Fourth Wave...

Which poverty context matters for long-term outcomes-family or community, economic or social? We construct a measure of poverty along these dimensions and analyze individual-level longitudinal data spanning 21 years in Indonesia to examine the long-term outcomes associated with different types...

The Philippines aspires to become a predominantly middle-class society by 2040. Significant strides have been achieved in the reduction of extreme poverty. However, the COVID-19 pandemic exposed the fragility of recent gains and the vulnerability of many households to economic shocks. This study...

This paper explores the link between poverty and food insecurity in Pakistan using household survey data and three measures of food insecurity-average calorie availability, minimum dietary energy requirement, and the perception-based Food Insecurity Experience Scale-at national, rural, and urban...

While Viet Nam has been remarkably successful in poverty reduction, the country is faced with various challenges ranging from uneven pockets of poverty, regional inequality, low labour productivity, and high informality rates, to a fast-ageing society. We offer an updated overview of the social...

Ethiopia initiated a major electricity sector reform in 2024, significantly increasing tariffs and introducing a value-added tax on electricity consumption to improve the financial sustainability of its stateowned utility. This study assesses the short-term distributional, sectoral, and...

Climate change is one of the most pressing challenges of this century. This is more so for developing and least-developed countries, which have limited means of adaptation and a high proportion of vulnerable populations. We empirically study the interconnection between climate and...

This paper assumes two kinds of social planners who evaluate income distributions concerning social welfare, economic inequality and poverty. The first kind of social planner, SPε , comprises averters to income inequality as measured by the normative parameter ε. The second kind of social...

Theoretical analysis, empirical development and case studies show that room to manoeuvre stabilising macroeconomic policies during the COVID-19 crisis in the years 2020 and 2021 were fundamentally different in the Global South and Global North. The latter used extensive discretionary fiscal and...

Mozambique is highly vulnerable to climate change. It faces frequent cyclones, floods, and droughts while having limited revenue collection capacity and social protection programmes. This paper assesses the distributional effects of climate shocks on household consumption and explores adaptation...

This paper examines the role of social protection in mitigating the adverse effects of conflict on household welfare. We assess the impact of a graduation intervention linked to Ethiopia's Productive Safety Net Programme, focusing on Amhara, a region severely affected by the Tigray conflict....

Climate change is associated with an increasing frequency of extreme weather events, which can severely reduce people's welfare, especially in the Global South. Here, we analyse the impacts of rainfall shocks - including lacking and excessive rains - on economic and social outcomes, using...

This paper utilises distributional random forests as a flexible machine learning method for analysing income distributions. Distributional random forests avoid parametric assumptions, capture complex interactions among covariates, and, once trained, provide full estimates of conditional income...

Despite high inflation, the real gross hourly wages of employees grew by around 15 percent from 1995 to 2022. In particular, the lowest wage decile caught back up to all other deciles following a sharp drop in real wages. At the same time, the low-wage sector has shrunk by nearly five percentage...

The transition to parenthood is a critical period that exacerbates gendered economic inequality, with mothers more likely than their partners to experience employment disruptions and income losses. This study examines individual poverty risk among partnered indivduals (N=1,237) in Germany from a...

I investigate the intra-household labor and resource allocation consequences of an employment guarantee targeting rural households in India. The guarantee insures household earnings, replacing women as added workers and shutting down a motive for saving. Despite sizable program-job take-up, the...

Reducing poverty and improving the living standards of the poor and vulnerable populations in Sri Lanka have been one of the country's key goals. The government has designed poverty-targeting programs with relevant government agencies working to support low-income families. The programs include...

Public works programmes (PWPs) are widely used social protection instruments in low- and middle-income countries. Participants carry out temporary, labour-intensive works in exchange for cash or in-kind compensation. The available empirical evidence indicates that these programmes are usually...

Obtaining comparable poverty estimates over time is critical for monitoring poverty trends and informing effective poverty reduction policies. Yet hardly any developing countries could construct consistent poverty trends over extended time periods due to changes to the consumption survey...

We study how minimum wage (MW) increases affect poverty and food hardship in the United States from 1981 to 2019. Applying stacked difference-in-difference models and the Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM), we find that a $1 MW increase reduces poverty by 0.3 to 0.7 percentage points among all...

In the 2000s, the Government of the People's Republic of China extended basic health insurance to most of the population. In the 2010s, it introduced a catastrophic medical insurance (CMI) program to further improve urban and rural residents' protection against financial shocks due to inpatient...

At the conclusion of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) campaign in 2015, stunting among under 5-year-olds remained a major challenge in South Asia and Southeast Asia, with South Asia lagging behind-a phenomenon known as the "Asian enigma." This paper revisits the issue, focusing on...

This article investigates the political cost of poverty in democracies marked by deep social divisions. We develop a probabilistic voting model that incorporates clientelism as a strategic tool employed by elite political parties to secure electoral support from non-elite voters. Unlike models...

Purpose - the purpose of the article is to compare the impotance factors for high-ed- ucated poverty modeling in the four cultural regions of East Java. Research methodology - using data from the Indonesian National Survey, this study employs Random Forest (RF), Extreme Gradient Boosting...

The Indonesian government has implemented poverty alleviation programs, including assistance programs for the poor. Despite these efforts, the number of impoverished individuals in South Sulawesi continues to rise. To address this issue, a statistical method is necessary to cluster the poor...

Income inequality is observed to have recently increased both at the country and regional level. Consequently, inequality, poverty and social stratification have become important issues of debate among economists, sociologists and social policy-makers. Thus, an in-depth statistical analysis of...