"Averting the old age crisis: policies to protect the old and promote growth,"the publication for which this technical annex provides supporting documentation, is the third in a series of major World Bank policy research reports. Unlike its predecessors,"The East Asian miracle"and"Adjustment in...

The authors empirically review and analyze the link between income distribution and aggregate savings. Recent research has focused on the impact of income inequality and growth. Less attention has been paid to the link between inequality and savings. Once the conventional representative-agent...

In examining what happens to poverty and income inequality during the early period of transition to a market economy, the author covers the period up to 1993. His analysis includes almost all transition economies that were not affected by wars, blockades, or embargoes. (In economies so affected,...

Recently, much attention has been paid in the literature on economic growth to the phenomenon of"conditional convergence,"the tendencies of economies with lower-level incomes to grow faster, conditional on their rate of factor accumulation. The author documents that, regardless of conditional...

Proposals aimed at improving the welfare of the poor often include indicator targeting, in which non-income characteristics (such as race, gender, or land ownership) that are correlated with income are used to target limited funds to groups likely to include a cincentration of the poor. Previous...

Using data from the 1992 Bulgarian household budget survey, the authors analyze the structure of income in Bulgaria, identifying who the poor are and how they are reached by the social safety net. Their main findings about household incomes: (a) Social transfers provide an extremely large...

The Ukraine is now faced with economic crisis on an unprecedented scale. The government has to follow rigorous demand management policies, which entail lowering the population's standard of living. To design policies that protect the poorest and most vulnerable groups in the society, it is...

Why does income inequality differ among countries? Using a sample of 80 countries from the 1980s, the author shows that two types of factors explain variations in income inequality. The first are factors that are, in the short term, independent of economic policies and are included in the...

Recent theory posits that accountability in public service can be enhanced by the use of"exit"and a"voice"mechanisms. With exit mechanisms, users of public services can choose alternative sources of supply. Exit mechanisms are viable when there is competition. They are not viable for essential...