Concerns about incentives and targeting naturally arise when cash transfers are used to fight poverty. The authors address these concerns in the context of China's Di Bao program, which uses means-tested transfers to try to assure that no registered urban resident has an income below a...

While the Azerbaijan household income and expenditure survey (HIES) data satisfy most empirical regularities expected in a typical household survey data, the inequality measures based on the data are unusually low. For example, for the latest three years for which we have data (2002 - 2004), the...

Just as equality of opportunity becomes an increasingly prominent concept in normative economics, the authors argue that it is also a relevant concept for positive models of the links between distribution and aggregate efficiency. Persuasive microeconomic evidence suggests that inequalities in...

The author analyzes the stability of the empirical relationship between growth and changes in inequality over time. He concludes that while during the 1970s and 1980s the growth process was not accompanied by increases in inequality, during the 1990s a positive and significant correlation...

This Joint Staff Advisory Note provides IMF staff advice on key priorities for strengthening Bangladesh’s poverty reduction strategy (PRS) and for ensuring its effective implementation. It highlights key strengths of the PRS while bringing out some weaknesses of existing policies that may...

Measured by the Gini coefficient, income inequality in Brazil rose from 0.57 in 1981 to 0.63 in 1989, before falling back to 0.56 in 2004. This latest figure would lower Brazil's world inequality rank from 2nd (in 1989) to 10th (in 2004). Poverty incidence also followed an inverted U-curve over...

The actual distribution of world income across countries is extremely unequal, much higher than the within country inequality faced by most countries. The question studied in this paper is: How do international policies on aid, trade, and factor movements affect the international distribution of...

Using a large cross-country income distribution dataset spanning close to 800 country-year observations from industrial and developing countries, the authors show that the size distribution of per capita income is well approximated empirically by a lognormal density. The null hypothesis that per...

This paper decomposes changes in inequality, which has in general been increasing in the transition economies of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, both by income source and socio-economic group, with a view to understanding the determinants of inequality and assessing how it might...

Effective development policymaking creates a need for reliable methods of assessing effectiveness. There should be, therefore, an intimate relationship between effective policymaking and impact analysis. The goal of a development intervention defines the metric by which to assess its impact,...