Little is known about the situation facing widows and their dependent children in West Africa especially after the widow remarries. Women in Malian society are vulnerable to the loss of husbands especially in rural areas. Households headed by widows have significantly lower living standards on...

India's huge expansion in rural electrification in the 1980s and 1990s offers lessons for other countries today. The paper examines the long-term effects of household electrification on consumption, labor supply, and schooling in rural India over 1982-99. It finds that household electrification...

While most economists assume that aid is fungible, most aid donors behave as if it is not. The authors study recipient government responses to development project aid in the context of a specific World Bank-financed project. They estimate the impact of a rural road rehabilitation project in...

In the absence of household level data on participation in public programs, spending allocations and poverty measures across regions of Morocco are used to infer incidence across poor and non-poor groups and to decompose incidence within rural and urban areas separately, as well as to decompose...

Routine quick-and-dirty methods of project appraisal can be so dirty in guiding project selection as to wipe out the net social gains from public investment. Routine quick-and-dirty methods of project appraisal can be so dirty in guiding project selection as to wipe out the net social gains from...

Could the simplifying assumptions made in project appraisal be so far from the truth that the expected benefits of public investments are not realized? Using data for Vietnam, commonly used estimates of the benefits from irrigation investments based on means are compared with impacts assessed...