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...

In a globalised world, recessions strike formal sectors more swiftly, which when adopting cost-cutting measures retrench regular workers with higher non-negotiable wages. An economywide computable general equilibrium (CGE) model with different labour market closures has been used to study the...

People's quality of life depends on the social relationships of their everyday lives and the technological choices that affect them. These features are readily described within the framework of social accounting, provided that relevant categories of households, workers, and economic activities...

The existing literature on self-help group (SHG) bank linkage programs portrays them as an effective tool being used in various countries to approach a range of socioeconomic issues. This paper explores the performance and sustainability of this type of program in India at the group level....

This volume breaks new ground in exploring trade liberalization and the informal economy, both through field research and a macro-model of two of the most labour-intensive sectorsgarments and rice processing. It innovatively compares and contrasts these two methodological approaches. It examines...