This paper provides evidence consistent with elite capture of Social Fund investment projects in Ecuador. Exploiting a unique combination of data-sets on village-level income distributions, Social Fund project administration, and province level electoral results, the authors test a simple model...

Poverty estimates based on cross-section data provide static snapshots of poverty rates. Although a time series of cross-section data can offer some insights into poverty trends, it does not allow for an assessment of dynamics at the household level. Such a dynamic perspective on poverty...

Little research currently exists on a vulnerability line that distinguishes the poor population from the population that is not poor but that still faces significant risk of falling back into poverty. This paper attempts to fill this gap by proposing vulnerability lines that can be...

Obtaining consistent estimates on poverty over time as well as monitoring poverty trends on a timely basis is a priority concern for policy makers. However, these objectives are not readily achieved in practice when household consumption data are neither frequently collected, nor constructed...

Important differences exist between communities with respect to their needs, capacities, and circumstances. As central governments are not able to discern these differences fully, they seek to achieve their policy objectives by relying on decentralized mechanisms that use local information....

This paper assembles data at the all-India level and for the village of Palanpur, Uttar Pradesh, to document the growing importance, and influence, of the non-farm sector in the rural economy between the early 1980s and late 2000s. The suggestion from the combined National Sample Survey and...

Panel data conventionally underpin the analysis of poverty mobility over time. However, such data are not readily available for most developing countries. Far more common are the"snap-shots"of welfare captured by cross-section surveys. This paper proposes a method to construct synthetic panel...

The authors discuss the use of imputed data in regression analysis, in particular the use of highly disaggregated welfare indicators (from so-called"poverty maps"). They show that such indicators can be used both as explanatory variables on the right-hand side and as the phenomenon to explain on...

Much attention has been paid to the relative vulnerability of two well-defined household groups during the transition. Some observers argue that old-age pensioner households have been relatively protected because of a less steep decline in real pensions compared with wages in most transition...

The authors review longitudinal village studies from a variety of disciplinary perspectives to identify changes in living standards in rural India in recent decades. They scrutinize the main forces of economic changes--agricultural intensification, changes in land relations, and occupational...