This paper assesses the impact of social assistance benefits on household welfare in Moldova. Ignoring standard issues of impact evaluations such as selection bias, behavioral responses, unobserved heterogeneity and endogeneity, an incidence analysis suggests that increased spending on social...

Most impact evaluations of Conditional Cash Transfers (CCTs) and Unconditional Cash Transfers (UCTs) focus on the returns to increased human capital investments that will be reaped largely or exclusively in the future (e.g., when current children have increased productivities as adults). But the...

Many low-income countries, such as Haiti, have high ambitions and socioeconomic needs to achieve substantial income growth, especially for the poorest income quintiles. This situation raises the question of policy prioritization, which is often difficult to address, since reliable...

Using a new database of household surveys, this paper examines inequality among all individuals living in developing East Asia regardless of their country of residence. The East Asian Gini index increased from 39.0 in 1988 to 43.3 in 2012. Inequality increased during the initial decade,...

Conditional cash transfer programs, whereby transfers to households are conditional on school attendance or health checkups, have become a widespread policy tool. They are viewed as a means of immediate poverty alleviation through the cash payments, and as a foundation of long-term poverty...

In the last decades, inequality of opportunity has been extensively studied by economists on the assumption that, in addition to being normatively undesirable, it can be related to low potential for growth. This paper evaluates inequality of opportunity and the different sources of unequal...

Although substantial progress has been made in combating malnutrition at the global level, chronic maternal and child malnutrition remains a serious problem in many parts of the developing world. This paper, using a randomized control trial design in Nepal, evaluates a program that provided...

International poverty estimates for countries in Africa commonly rely on national consumer price indexes to adjust trends in nominal consumption over time for changes in the cost of living. However, the consumer price index is subject to various types of measurement bias. This paper uses Engel...

Growth is an important channel for poverty reduction. Policies to make growth more "inclusive" have permeated the development debate and "pro-poor growth" has been the subject of a wide range of papers in the literature, including issues related to measurement, modeling, and policy. However, the...

Do higher food prices help or hinder poverty reduction? Despite much debate, existing research has almost solely relied on simulation models to address this question. In this paper World Bank poverty estimates are used to systematically test the relationship between changes in poverty and...