This paper provides evidence from eight developing countries of an inverse relationship between poverty and city size. Poverty is both more widespread and deeper in very small and small towns than in large or very large cities. This basic pattern is generally robust to the choice of poverty...

Assessments of the distributional effects of public spending reforms have generally been based on average rates of program participation by income or expenditure group. This practice can be deceptive because the socioeconomic composition of participants can change as a social program expands or...

Governments and international development agencies have intensified efforts to promote small-scale enterprises as an engine of pro-poor growth. In Brazil, however, small scale industries may also be responsible for the bulk of air pollution emissions. Although employees of polluting small-scale...

This paper provides evidence from eight developing countries of an inverse relationship between poverty and city size. Poverty is both more widespread and deeper in very small and small towns than in large or very large cities. This basic pattern is generally robust to the choice of poverty...

Communities differ in important ways in their needs, capacities, and circumstances. Because 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. Household and...

Inequalities in learning opportunities arise from both household, and school-related factors. Although these factors are unlikely to be independent, few studies have considered the extent to which sorting between schools and households might aggravate educational inequalities. To fill this gap,...

During Vietnam's two decades of rapid economic growth, its fertility rate has fallensharply at the same time that its educational attainment has risen rapidly - macro trendsthat are consistent with the hypothesis of a quantity-quality tradeoff in child-rearing. We investigate whether the...