The effect of macroeconomic crises on child health is a topic of great policy importance. This article analyzes the impact of a profound crisis in Peru on infant mortality. It finds an increase of about 2.5 percentage points in the infant mortality rate for children born during the crisis of the...

Between 1992 and 1998 the Peruvian Social Fund (foncodes) spent about US dollar 570 million funding micro projects throughout the country. Many of these projects involved constructing and renovating school facilities. This article uses data from foncodes, the 1993 population census in Peru, and...

Between 1992 and 1998 the Peruvian Social Fund (FONCODES) spent about US$570 million funding microprojects throughout the country. Many of these projects involved constructing and renovating school facilities. This article uses data from FONCODES, the 1993 population census in Peru, and a 1996...

The effect of macroeconomic crises on child health is a topic of great policy importance. This article analyzes the impact of a profound crisis in Peru on infant mortality. It finds an increase of about 2.5 percentage points in the infant mortality rate for children born during the crisis of the...

Paxson and Schady examine the relationship between early cognitive development, socioeconomic status, child health, and parenting quality in a developing country. They use a sample of over 3,000 predominantly poor pre-school age children from Ecuador and analyze determinants of their scores on...

The authors examine how a government-run cash transfer program targeted to poor mothers in rural Ecuador influenced the health and development of their children. This program is of particular interest because, unlike other transfer programs that have been implemented recently in Latin America,...

The effect of economic crises on child health is a topic of great policy importance. The authors use data from the Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) to analyze the impact of the profound 1988-92 economic crisis in Peru on infant mortality and anthropometrics. They show that there was an...

The World Development Report (WDR) has become such a fixture that it is easy to forget the circumstances under which it was born and the Bank's motivation for producing such a report at that time. In the first chapter of this essay, the authors provide a brief background on the circumstances of...

An analyst using household survey data to construct a welfare metric is often confronted with onfronted with An analyst using household survey data to construct a welfare metric is often confronted with a number of theoretical and practical problems. What components should be included in the...

As recent discussions have made clear, the apparent lack of poverty reduction in the face of historically high rates of economic growth-both in the world as a whole and in specific countries (most notably India)-provides fuel for the argument that economic growth does little to reduce poverty....