In the absence of reliable and exhaustive income data, Proxy Means Tests (PMTs) are frequently employed as a cost-effective way to identify income-poor beneficiaries of targeted anti-poverty programs. However, their usefulness depends on whether proxies accurately identify the income poor. Based...

In this paper, we compare Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and Partial Least Squares (PLS) methods to generate weights for composite indices. In this context we also consider various treatments of non-metric variables when constructing such composite indices. Using simulation studies we find...

In this paper the Social Institutions and Gender Index (SIGI) is constructed with Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and Partial Least Squares (PLS). Using the SIGI, we test the effects of social institutions related to gender inequality on several development outcomes, such as female education,...

The 2007/2008 food price crisis and the following global economic recession has (temporarily) increased the number of people to suffer from hunger. While the impacts can be measured with precision only ex post, for policy makers it is critical to get a sense of likely impacts ex ante in order to...

Using data from 1988 to 2007, we examine to what extent bilateral aid flows of an individual donor to a country depend on aid flows from all other bilateral and multilateral donors to that country in that year. We thereby want to assess to what extent donor coordination, free-riding,...

In this paper we examine the impact of mandated reservations for female sarpanchs in the gram panchayats on perceptions of service delivery and women’s democratic participation. Using survey data from the Sangli district, Maharashtra, we find that the availability of basic, public services is...

In a recent paper in the Review of Economic Studies, Siwan Anderson and Debraj Ray (Anderson and Ray, 2010) develop and apply a new ‘flow’ measure of ‘missing women’ to estimate the extent of gender bias in mortality in developing countries. Contrary to the existing literature, they find...

The MDGs are interlinked: acceleration in one goal is likely to speed up progress in others. Nevertheless, these synergies are not always visible, and may differ across countries. Using bivariate cluster analysis, this paper investigates whether distinct groups of developing countries can be...

As is now well documented, aid is given for both political as well as economic reasons. The conventional wisdom is that politically-motivated aid is less effective in promoting developmental objectives. We examine the ex-post performance ratings of World Bank projects and generally find that...

We investigate the accuracy of ex ante assessments of vulnerability to income poverty using cross-sectional data and panel data. We use long-term panel data from Germany and apply different regression models, based on household covariates and previous-year equivalence income, to classify a...