The effects of public investments aimed at directly improving children's health are theoretically ambiguous, since the outcomes also depend on indirect effects through parental inputs. The authors investigate the role of such inputs in influencing the incidence of child health gains from access...

The authors assess the impact of Argentina's main social policy response to the severe economic crisis of 2002. The program aimed to provide direct income support for families with dependents, for whom the head had become unemployed due to the crisis. Counterfactual comparisons are based on a...

Longstanding development issues are revisited in the light of a newly-constructed data set of poverty measures for India spanning 60 years, including 20 years since reforms began in earnest in 1991. The study finds a downward trend in poverty measures since 1970, with an acceleration post-1991,...

Adjustment programs often emphasize protecting social spending - especially pro-poor spending - from cuts. Yet the incidence of fiscal contraction - and hence the case for action to protect public spending on the poor at a time of overall fiscal austerity - is an empirical question, which the...

The paper provides new measures of global poverty that take seriously the idea of relative-income comparisons but also acknowledge a deep identification problem when the latent norms defining poverty vary systematically across countries. Welfare-consistent measures are shown to be bounded below...

The paper presents a major overhaul to the World Bank's past estimates of global poverty, incorporating new and better data. Extreme poverty-as judged by what quot;povertyquot; means in the world's poorest countries-is found to be more pervasive than we thought. Yet the data also provide robust...

Credibility and transparency are at the core of the current debate about exchange rate regimes. The steady growth in the magnitude and variability of international capital flows has complicated the question of whether to use floating, fixed, or intermediate exchange rate regimes. Emerging market...

Development practitioners are coming to a consensus that participation by the intended beneficiaries improves project performance. But is there convincing evidence that this is true? Skeptics have three objections: 1) quot;Participation is not objective -- project rankings are subjective; 2) this...

The central governments of many developing countries have chosen to decentralize their anti-poverty programs, in the expectation that local agents are better informed about local needs. The paper shows that this potential advantage of decentralized eligibility criteria can come at a large cost,...

The authors report new estimates of measures of absolute poverty for the developing world over 1981-2004. A clear trend decline in the percentage of people who are absolutely poor is evident, although with uneven progress across regions. They find more mixed success in reducing the total number...