This article examines the dynamics of the informal sector in Madagascar during the 1995-2004 period, which was characterized by sustained growth that ended due to a major political crisis. As conventionally assumed by simple dualistic models, the informal sector indeed fulfils a labor-absorbing...

The purpose of our paper is to derive instructive analytics on how to account for differentials in demographic variables, and in particular mortality, when performing welfare comparisons over time. The idea is to “correct” in various ways estimated income distribution measures for “sample...

Small entrepreneurs in poor countries achieve relatively high marginal returns to capital but show only low re-investment rates. The literature is rather inconclusive about the possible causes. We explore whether ‘forced redistribution’, i.e. abusive demands by the kin, affects the...

Lack of knowledge about risk differentials regarding AIDS seriously hampers the study of the economic impact of AIDS in developing countries, at both the macro- and micro-economic levels. In this paper, we derive, we think, reasonable assumptions on mortality risk differentials by age,...

We propose a new methodology for comparing poverty over multiple periods across time and space that does not arbitrarily aggregate income over various years or rely on arbitrarily specified poverty lines or poverty indices. Following Duclos et al. (2006a), we use the multivariate stochastic...

Microsimulation constitutes a particularly powerful instrument for evaluating the distributive impact of macro-economic shocks. All existing models applied to developing countries remain static. I develop a dynamic model able to account for the temporal dimension of macro-economic shocks and...

Previous poverty assessments for Burkina Faso were biased due to the neglect of some important methodological issues. This led to the so-called ‘Burkinabè Growth-Poverty-Paradox’, i.e. relatively sustained macro-economic growth, but almost constant poverty. We estimate that poverty...

The theoretical literature on pro-poor growth as well as its applications have not paid sufficient attention to the issue of varying inflation rates across the income distribution. Ignoring inflation inequality in pro-poor growth measurements can however severely bias assessments of pro-poor...