The goal of the World Bank is 'a world free of poverty' but the most widely used poverty measures do not show when poverty might be eliminated. The 'head-count index' simply counts the poor, while the 'poverty gap index' shows their average shortfall from the poverty line. Neither measure...

Standard error corrections for clustered samples impose untested restrictions on spatial correlations. Our example shows these are too conservative, compared with a spatial error model that exploits information on exact locations of observations, causing inference errors when cluster corrections...

The proper design of price interventions in energy markets requires consideration of equity and efficiency effects. In this paper, budget survey data from 29,000 Indonesian households are used to estimate a demand system for five energy sources, which is identified by the spatial variation in...

There is growing interest in the rural non-farm sector in developing countries as a contributor to economic growth, employment generation, livelihood diversification and poverty reduction. Access to infrastructure is identified in some studies as a factor that affects non-farm rural employment...

This paper investigates whether there is a non-linear relationship between income and the private transfers received by households in developing countries. If private transfers are unresponsive to household income, expansion of public social security and other transfer programs is unlikely to...

In this paper, we apply a recently developed small-area estimation technique to derive geographically detailed estimates of consumption-based poverty and inequality in rural Shaanxi, China. We also investigate whether using environmental variables derived mainly from satellite remote sensing...

In urban China the Household Income and Expenditure Survey requires respondents to keep a daily expenditure diary for a full 12-month period. This onerous reporting task makes it difficult to recruit households into the survey, compromising the representative nature of the sample. In this...

In this note, propensity score matching (PSM) methods are applied to data from the 2005 International Social Survey Program Work Orientations (ISSP-WO) survey to examine the public sector pay premium in New Zealand. Taking account of a wide range of worker characteristics and attitudes, job...

The nature and location of urbanization economies and their effects on productivity per worker in China are examined. Unlike previous studies, more accurate resident-based measures of urban scale from the 2010 census are used. The size of urbanization economies is similar to those in other...

The large literature on regional inequality in China is hampered by incomplete evidence on price dispersion across space, making it hard to distinguish real and nominal inequality. The two main methods used to calculate spatial deflators have been to price a national basket of goods and services...