I examine the changes in poverty and inequality in South Africa during the first 5 years following the end of the apartheid era. First, I construct new, comparable consumption aggregates for 1995 and 2000. Second, using the “cost-of basic-needs” approach, I derive lower-bound (R322, in South...

This article investigates the processes of market selection and industry dynamics in a sub-Saharan Africa context. Using census-based longitudinal data, it examines the distribution of productivity within an industry to determine whether patterns of firm entry, exit, and survival are driven by...

Increases in formal sector lending among the poor have created a need for credit information systems that provide potential lenders with borrower information. In this article we present fixed-effects estimations that attempt to measure the effect of a newly implemented credit information system...

We study the poverty impacts over time and space of Indonesia’s severe economy-wide crisis of 1998, using 10 large national surveys spanning 1993–2002. On allowing for shifts in relative prices stemming from the crisis, we find a sharp but geographically uneven increase in the poverty rate...

This article examines one reason why individuals develop and maintain local-level financial savings organizations known as rotating savings and credit organizations, or Roscas. Economic theories suggest that individuals form Roscas to finance the purchase of a lumpy durable good, in response to...

Civil wars and ethnic conflicts have resulted in an estimated number of approximately 35 million refugees and internally displaced persons worldwide. Understanding the determinants of forced migration is an important prerequisite for the definition of appropriate policies of prevention,...