The authors use a 13-year panel of individuals in Tanzania to assess how adult mortality shocks affect both short and long-run consumption growth of surviving household members. Using unique data which tracks individuals from 1991 to 2004, they examine consumption growth, controlling for a set...

This paper presents unique evidence that orphanhood matters in the long run for health and education outcomes, in a region of Northwestern Tanzania. The paper studies a sample of 718 non-orphaned children surveyed in 1991-94, who were traced and re-interviewed as adults in 2004. A large...

This study explores the extent to which migration has contributed to improved living standards of individuals in Tanzania. Using longitudinal data on individuals, the authors estimate the impact of migration on consumption growth between 1991 and 2004. The analysis addresses concerns about...

A good understanding of the constraints on agricultural growth in Africa relies on the accurate measurement of smallholder labor. Yet, serious weaknesses in these statistics persist. The extent of bias in smallholder labor data is examined by conducting a randomized survey experiment among...

There is wide variation in how consumption is measured in household surveys both across countries and over time. This variation may confound welfare comparisons in part because these alternative survey designs produce consumption estimates that are differentially influenced by contrasting types...

This paper develops the concept of "action space" as the range of possible destinations to which a migrant can realistically move at a given point in time and, intimately linked to this, the set of possible livelihoods at destination. It shows how this space expands and contracts over time...

Should public investment be targeted to big cities or to small towns, if the objective is to minimize national poverty? To answer this policy question, this paper extends the basic Todaro-type model of rural-urban migration to the case of migration from rural areas to two potential destinations,...

There is widespread interest in the number of hungry people in the world and trends in hunger. Current global counts rely on combining each country's total food balance with information on distribution patterns from household consumption expenditure surveys. Recent research has advocated for...

This paper uses data from eight different consumption questionnaires randomly assigned to 4,000 households in Tanzania to obtain evidence on the nature of measurement errors in estimates of household consumption. While there are no validation data, the design of one questionnaire and the...

A rather unique panel tracking more than 3,300 individuals from households in rural Kagera, Tanzania during 1991/4-2010 shows that about one in two individuals/households who exited poverty did so by transitioning from agriculture into the rural nonfarm economy or secondary towns. Only one in...