Using household data specifically collected for the purpose of evaluation, the authors empirically evaluate the impact on household income of a rural program in China that focuses on increasing women's economic and social participation in the local community. They find that the program...

Participation in social programs, such as clubs and other social organizations, results from a process in which an agent learns about the requirements, benefits, and likelihood of acceptance related to a program, applies to be a participant, and, finally, is accepted or rejected. The authors...

This paper examines the extent to which the three key underlying determinants of nutrition -- food security; adequate caregiving resources at the maternal, household, and community levels; and access to health services and a safe and hygienic environment -- on their own and interactively are...

The performance of the Simple Poverty Scorecard is compared against the performance of established regression-based estimators. All estimates are benchmarked against observed poverty status based on household expenditure (or income) data from household socioeconomic surveys that span nearly a...

This paper summarizes the results of the impact evaluation of the Access to Information pilot project on empowerment of citizens in poor municipalities in the Dominican Republic. Among the dimensions of empowerment investigated are civic knowledge, awareness and use of the right to information,...

This paper takes advantage of the exogenous phasing of direct elections in districts and applies the double-difference estimator to measure impacts on (i) human development outcomes and (ii) the pattern of public spending and revenue generation at the district level. The analysis reveals that...

Combining nightlight data as a proxy for economic activity with remote sensing data typically used for natural hazard modeling, this paper constructs novel damage indices at the district level for Indonesia, for different disaster events such as floods, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and the...

This paper combines district-level government spending data from Indonesia and natural disaster damage indices to analyze the extent to which districts are forced to reallocate their expenditures across categories after the incidence of floods, earthquakes, and volcanic eruptions. The results...

Conditional cash transfer (CCT) programs aim to alleviate poverty through monetary and in-kind benefits, as well as reduce future levels of poverty by encouraging investments in education, health, and nutrition. The success of CCT programs at reducing poverty depends on whether, and the extent...

Despite significant changes in poverty overall in Latin America, the proportion of indigenous peoples living in poverty did not change much from the early 1990s to the present. While earlier work focused on human development, much less has been done on the distribution and returns to...