A good understanding of the constraints on agricultural growth in Africa relies on the accurate measurement of smallholder labor. Yet, serious weaknesses in these statistics persist. The extent of bias in smallholder labor data is examined by conducting a randomized survey experiment among...

There is wide variation in how consumption is measured in household surveys both across countries and over time. This variation may confound welfare comparisons in part because these alternative survey designs produce consumption estimates that are differentially influenced by contrasting types...

Should public investment be targeted to big cities or to small towns, if the objective is to minimize national poverty? To answer this policy question, this paper extends the basic Todaro-type model of rural-urban migration to the case of migration from rural areas to two potential destinations,...

For a long time, the urbanization and development discourse has coincided with a focus on economic growth and big cities. Yet, much of the world's new urbanization is taking place in smaller urban entities (towns), and the composition of urbanization may well bear on the speed of poverty...

The authors use a 13-year panel of individuals in Tanzania to assess how adult mortality shocks affect both short and long-run consumption growth of surviving household members. Using unique data which tracks individuals from 1991 to 2004, they examine consumption growth, controlling for a set...

Do poor households shop in a way that leaves money on the table? A simple way to maximize consumption, conditional on available cash, is to avoid regularly purchasing small amounts of nonperishable goods when bulk discounts are available at modestly larger quantities. Using two-week transaction...

This paper develops the concept of "action space" as the range of possible destinations to which a migrant can realistically move at a given point in time and, intimately linked to this, the set of possible livelihoods at destination. It shows how this space expands and contracts over time...

There is widespread interest in the number of hungry people in the world and trends in hunger. Current global counts rely on combining each country's total food balance with information on distribution patterns from household consumption expenditure surveys. Recent research has advocated for...

Over the past two decades, more than half the population in rural Tanzania migrated within the country, profoundly changing the nature of traditional institutions such as informal risk sharing. Mass internal migration has created geographically disperse networks, on which the authors collected...

A rather unique panel tracking more than 3,300 individuals from households in rural Kagera, Tanzania during 1991/4-2010 shows that about one in two individuals/households who exited poverty did so by transitioning from agriculture into the rural nonfarm economy or secondary towns. Only one in...