Can project evaluation methods be used to evaluate programs: complex interventions involving multiple activities? A program evaluation cannot be based simply on separate evaluations of its components if interactions between the activities are important. In this paper a measure is proposed, the...

How exposure to risk affects economic growth is a key issue in development. This article quantifies both the ex ante and ex post effects of risk using long-running panel data for rural households in Zimbabwe. It proposes a simulation-based econometric methodology to estimate the structural form...

How exposure to risk affects economic growth is a key issue in development. This article quantifies both the ex ante and ex post effects of risk using long-running panel data for rural households in Zimbabwe. It proposes a simulation-based econometric methodology to estimate the structural form...

Can project evaluation methods be used to evaluate programs: complex interventions involving multiple activities? A program evaluation cannot be based simply on separate evaluations of its components if interactions between the activities are important. In this paper a measure is proposed, the...

Communities differ in important ways in their needs, capacities, and circumstances. Because central governments are not able to discern these differences fully, they seek to achieve their policy objectives by relying on decentralized mechanisms that use local information. Household and...

Communities differ in important ways in their needs, capacities, and circumstances. Because central governments are not able to discern these differences fully, they seek to achieve their policy objectives by relying on decentralized mechanisms that use local information. Household and...

Estimates of the area- and household idiosyncratic error distributions from household income and consumption regression models across 142 household surveys from 16 different countries, the type of models that underpin poverty maps, points to significant deviations from normality. Accounting for...

The authors propose a modification to the conventional approach of decomposing income inequality by population sub-groups. Specifically, they propose a measure that evaluates observed between-group inequality against a benchmark of maximum between-group inequality that can be attained when the...

The small-area estimation technique developed for producing poverty maps has been applied in a large number of developing countries. Opportunities to formally test the validity of this approach remain rare due to lack of appropriately detailed data. This paper compares a set of predicted welfare...

The authors examine the performance of small area welfare estimation. The method combines census and survey data to produce spatially disaggregated poverty and inequality estimates. To test the method, they compare predicted welfare indicators for a set of target populations with their true...