Surprisingly, the most severe economic crisis the world has seen since the great depression does not appear to have had as dramatic an impact on poverty in Latin America as might have been expected. The exceptions to this heartening assessment are the countries geographically and economically...

Cash transfer programmes are a popular social protection tool in developing countries that aim, among other things, to improve education outcomes in developing countries. The debate over whether these programmes should include conditions has been at the forefront of recent policy discussions....

Africa’s Pulse is a biannual publication containing an analysis of the near-term macro-economic outlook for the region. It also includes a section focusing on a topic that represents a particular development challenges for the continent. It is produced by the Office of the Chief Economist for...

This paper provides evidence from eight developing countries of an inverse relationship between poverty and city size. Poverty is both more widespread and deeper in very small and small towns than in large or very large cities. This basic pattern is generally robust to the choice of poverty...

Widespread agreement that poverty is a multifaceted phenomenon, encompassing deprivations along multiple dimensions, clashes with often vociferous disagreement about how best to measure these deprivations. Drawing on the recent literature, this short note proposes three methodological...

Widespread agreement that poverty is a multifaceted phenomenon encompassing deprivations in multiple dimensions clashes with the vociferous disagreement about how best to measure these deprivations. Drawing on the recent literature, this short paper reviews three methodological alternatives to...

This paper offers an axiomatic characterization of two classes of poverty measures that are sensitive to inequality of opportunity, one a strict subset of the other. The proposed indices are sensitive not only to income shortfalls from the poverty line, but also to differences in the...

Widespread agreement that poverty is a multifaceted phenomenon encompassing deprivations in multiple dimensions clashes with the vociferous disagreement about how best to measure these deprivations. Drawing on the recent literature, this short paper reviews three methodological alternatives to...

Socioeconomic segregation is often decried for denying poorer children the benefits of positive 'peer effects'. Yet standard, linear-in-means models of peer effects (a) implicitly assume that segregation is zero sum, with gains and losses to rich and poor perfectly offsetting, and (b) rule out...