A central question for policy makers concerned with helping the poor through a macro crisis is how to target scarcer resources at a time of greater need. Technical arguments suggest that finer targeting through tightening individual programs or reallocation resources towards more tightly...

In the last two decades, across a range of countries high growth rates have reduced poverty but have been accompanied by rising inequality. This paper is motivated by this stylized fact, and by the strong distributional concerns that persist among populations and policy makers alike, despite the...

In an economy with migration, poverty changes are composed of a number of forces, including the income gains and losses realized by the various migration streams. We present a simple but powerful decomposition methodology that uses panel data to measure the contributions of different migration...

The fraction of workers currently covered by minimum wages in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) is small, but as formality and urbanization increase, wage regulation will become increasingly relevant. In this analysis, we find that higher minimum wage values are associated with higher levels of GDP per...

Empirical investigations of poverty in developing countries tend to focus on the incidence of poverty at a particular point in time. If the incidence of poverty increases, however, there is no information about how many new poor have joined the existing poor and how many people have escaped...

The authors report on an exercise in economic statistics. They develop a regional price index for Cote d'Ivoire building on the strengths of two independent data sources: the Cote d'Ivoire Living Standards Survey (CILSS) and the International Comparisons Project (ICP). The CILSS collected...

Cote d'Ivoire's economy declined drastically in the second half of the 1980s. The incidence of poverty climbed from 30 percent in 1985 to 35 percent in 1987, and jumped to 46 percent in 1988. But how widespread was the collapse in living standards? Did a lucky few escape the decline? Using...

This article uses panel survey data for Cote d'Ivoire to investigate the determinants of welfare gains and losses of households over time. A first-difference model is estimated which takes account of initial conditions. For urban areas, it was found that human capital is not only a key...