Cash transfers targeted to poor people, but conditional on some behavior on their part, such as school attendance or regular visits to health care facilities, are being adopted in a growing number of developing countries. Even where ex-post impact evaluations have been conducted, a number of...

This paper presents an original method to study individual earning dynamics using repeated cross-sectional data. Because panel data of individuals are seldom available in developing countries, it is difficult to study individual earning dynamics and related issues such as the propensity of...

Measuring the incidence of public spending in education requires an intergenerational framework distinguishing between what current and future generations - that is, parents and children - give and receive. In standard distributional incidence analysis, households are assumed to receive a...

The actual distribution of world income across countries is extremely unequal, much higher than the within country inequality faced by most countries. The question studied in this paper is: How do international policies on aid, trade, and factor movements affect the international distribution of...

This paper briefly reviews the main theories of state versus private ownership and empirical evidence on the impact of privatization in developing countries (including transition economies). The paper draws some lessons for policy and offers some suggestions on how to assess privatization, at...

Drawing lessons from country studies, the authors examine the effects of adjustment policies on the distribution of income in Chile, Cote d'Ivoire, Ecuador, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Morocco. After analyzing the issues that must be confronted in designing adjustment programs with a focus on...

The authors develop a microeconometric method to account for differences across distributions of household income. Going beyond the determination of earnings in labor markets, they also estimate statistical models for occupational choice and for conditional distributions of education, fertility,...

In many developing countries, achieving the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) by 2015 will require significant increases in expenditures on social services and in foreign assistance. It will also require careful planning of the sector allocation and sequencing of public spending. Especially...

The 1980s was a period of external shocks for developing countries, and domestic macroeconomic imbalance and structural inefficiencies compounded the effects. But the performance of developing countries was not uniform. The authors devised a model for simulating the effects of terms of trade and...