In the wake of reforms to establish a free market in land-use rights, Vietnam is experiencing a pronounced rise in rural landlessness. To some observers this is a harmless by-product of a more efficient economy, while to others it signals the return of the pre-socialist class-structure, with the...

We know surprisingly little about the long-run impacts of household electrification. This paper studies the impacts on consumption in rural India over a 17-year period, allowing for both internal and external (village-level) effects. Under our identifying assumptions, electrification brought...

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, contend the authors, illustrating their point with a case study of irrigation projects in Vietnam. They test a common quick-and-dirty...

Vietnam's ethnic minorities, who tend to live mostly in remote rural areas, typically have lower living standards than the ethnic majority. How much is this because of differences in economic characteristics (such as education levels and land) rather than low returns to characteristics? Is there...

We show how differences in aggregate human development outcomes over time and space can be additively decomposed into a pure mean income (growth) component, a component attributed to differences in the distribution of income, and components attributed to ‘non-income’ factors and...

India’s 2005 National Rural Employment Guarantee Act creates a justiciable 'right to work' by promising up to 100 days of wage employment per year to all rural households whose adult members volunteer to do unskilled manual work. Work is provided in public works projects at the stipulated...