This paper re-examines the roles of changes in income and inequality in poverty reduction. The study provides estimates of the relative effects of inequality reduction versus growth promotion in reducing poverty for countries with different levels of initial poverty. The analysis uses country...

Using panel data for Peru for 1994-2000, the authors find that when households receive two, or more services jointly, the welfare increases as measured by changes in consumption are larger than when services are provided separately. The increases appear to be more than proportional, as F-tests...

This paper studies the relationship between inequality of opportunity and development outcomes in a cross-country setting. Scholars have long debated the impact of inequality on growth, development, and the quality of institutions in a society. The empirical relationships are however confounded...

This paper quantifies the contributions of different factors to poverty reduction observed in Bangladesh, Peru and Thailand over the last decade. In contrast to methods that focus on aggregate summary statistics, the method adopted here generates entire counterfactual distributions to account...

Demographics, labor income, public transfers, or remittances: Which factor contributes the most to observed reductions in poverty? Using counterfactual simulations, this paper accounts for the contribution labor income has made to the observed changes in poverty over the past decade for a set of...

This paper presents an incidence analysis of both social spending and taxation for seven Latin American countries, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The analysis shows that Latin American countries are headed de facto toward a minimalist welfare state similar to the one in the United...

The authors use a large panel data set from Zambia to examine factors that could explain the relatively lackluster performance of the country's agricultural sector after liberalization. Zambia's liberalization significantly opened the economy but failed to alter the structure of production or...

With the recent resurgence of interest in equity, inequality, and growth, the possibility of a negative relationship between inequality and economic growth, has received renewed interest in the literature. Faced with the prospect that high levels of inequality may persist, and give rise to...

Tunisian social development policy making has always counted on energy subsidies to play a pivotal role. Due to the increasingly unsustainable budget implications, a new strategy has begun to reform the subsidy system in the energy sector while striking a balance between improving fiscal and...

Financial education programs are increasingly offered by governments, nonprofits, and financial institutions. However, voluntary participation rates in such programs are often very low, posing a severe challenge for randomized experiments attempting to measure their impact. This study uses a...