Although it has become accepted as a matter of course that small firms are important for economic development and there exists an abundant literature on small enterprise promotion, very little attention is given to understanding the factors that affect small firms' capacity to participate in...

I test a model of Pareto efficient risk sharing within households using consumption data from Ghana. The results reject this model despite showing that individual consumption is not significantly affected by both agricultural and illness shocks. Turning to transfer data, I find evidence that men...

This paper is concerned with organisational responses of residents in one low-income urban community located in the Province of KwaZulu-Natal. The area concerned is Mpumalanga Township near Durban, and it is an area that has had a difficult history of political violence. This has meant that,...

The transition from a command economy in the FSU resulted in increased activities in the informal sector. However despite prevalent delays in wage payments many workers were still observed to be working full-time in the formal sector. Here a model of workers' labour supply decisions incorporates...

This paper investigates the overlap between employment status and poverty, drawing particular attention to the working poor and precarious workers, and to the existence of multiple labor-related risks faced by specific groups. This analysis is undertaken using the Kyrgyz Poverty Monitoring...

This paper examines the decline of National Insurance in Britain, as witnessed by its declining share of all social security spending and the steady dilution of the ¿contributory principle¿ on which it was originally based. It argues that this decline is not an accident: under governments of...

Parental divorce has been an increasing experience amongst the generations of children born since the 1970s in European countries. This study analyses data on the partnership and parenthood behaviour of those children who experienced parental separation during childhood for nine Western European...

In the Former Soviet Union, the early 1990s were characterized by large falls in GDP and small changes to already low unemployment. The slow adjustment to unemployment was a result of employers using various means to maintain employment levels, including; extended periods of unpaid leave,...

Renewed interest in disadvantaged neighbourhoods is generating increasing research activity. Current work includes qualitative community studies and quantitative investigations of area effects on individual outcomes. This paper criticises the contribution of area effects research to date....

Equivalisation of incomes for household size and composition is accepted practice when measuring poverty and inequality; adjustments to take account of other variations in needs are rarely made. This paper explores the financial implications of one possible source of additional needs:...