This case study for India finds an explanation for the drop in average household consumption in rural areas occurring in the year after the 1991 stabilization program instigated to deal with a macroeconomic crisis. A number of factors contributed to falling average living standards, including...

The author measures structural adjustment's impact on growth and on the poor in Tanzania. Adjustment reforms have contributed to robust growth. The rural average per capita income in 1991 was, in real terms, significantly higher than in 1983. The Economic Recovery Program, launched in 1986, has...

The authors study transient poverty in a six-year panel dataset for a sample of 5,000 households in post-reform rural China. Half of the mean squared poverty gap is transient, in that it is directly attributable to fluctuations in consumption over time. There is enough transient poverty to...

Poor-area development programs- in which the government transfers extra resources to unusually poor areas -have been widely used to fight poverty. There has been some research on such programs, but little is known about their impact on household living standards over time. The authors address...

Since January 1990, Poland's social safety net has changed greatly. Unemployment benefits were introduced, for example, because of escalating unemployment (about 15 percent of the labor force at the end of 1993). The cost of the social safety net has risen sharply since the transition began,...

Ninety percent of the differences across countries in total fertility rates are accounted for solely by differences in women's reported desired fertility. Using desired fertility constructed from both retrospective and prospective questions, together with instrumental variables estimation, it is...

Cote d'Ivoire's economy declined drastically in the second half of the 1980s. The incidence of poverty climbed from 30 percent in 1985 to 35 percent in 1987, and jumped to 46 percent in 1988. But how widespread was the collapse in living standards? Did a lucky few escape the decline? Using...