We know surprisingly little about the long-run impacts of household electrification. This paper studies the impacts on consumption in rural India over a 17-year period, allowing for both internal and external (village-level) effects. Under our identifying assumptions, electrification brought...

Standard welfare comparisons between female-headed households (FHHs) and male-headed households (MHHs) have largely ignored two confounding factors: marital status (affecting access to assets and markets) and heterogeneity in household demographics (with bearing on economies of scale in...

Could the simplifying assumptions made in project appraisal be so far from the truth that the expected benefits of public investments are not realized? Using data for Vietnam, commonly used estimates of the benefits from irrigation investments based on means are compared with impacts assessed...

Intra-household inequalities have long been a source of concern for policy design, but there is very little evidence about their effects. The current practice of ignoring inequality within households could lead to an underestimation of both overall inequality and poverty levels, as well as to...

Indonesia has made great progress during the past fifteen years in enhancing the command of the poor over privately provided goods, such as food, clothing, and housing. Has similar progress been made in improving their access to publicly provided social services? The article looks at how the use...

It has been claimed that in recent times the poor have lost ground, both relatively and absolutely, even when average levels of living have risen. This article tests that claim using household surveys for 67 developing and transitional economies over 1981-94. It finds that changes in inequality...

Using a new series of consistent, consumption-based poverty measures spanning forty years, we assess how much India's poor shared in the country's economic growth, taking into account its urban-rural and output composition. Rural consumption growth reduced poverty in both rural and urban areas....

The article assesses the impact of Argentina's main social policy response to the severe economic crisis of 2002. The program was intended to provide direct income support for families with dependents and whose head had become unemployed because of the crisis. Counterfactual comparisons are...