Why is it that, as the Chinese Communist Party has loosened its grip, abandoned its core beliefs, and marketized the economy, its membership has risen markedly along with the economic benefits of joining? We use three national household surveys, spanning eleven years, to answer this question...

This paper estimates trends in absolute poverty in urban China from 1988 to 2002 using the Chinese Household Income Project (CHIP) surveys. Poverty incidence curves are plotted, showing that poverty has fallen markedly during the period regardless of the exact location of the poverty line....

Survey data from urban China in 2002 show levels of life satisfaction to be low, but not exceptionally so, by international comparison. Many of the determinants of life satisfaction in urban China appear comparable to those for people in other countries. These include, inter alia, unemployment,...

Background: In many low-income countries, including in Bangladesh, girls tend to marry early and have children very soon after marriage. Although conveying infant and young child nutrition (IYCN) knowledge to adolescent girls in a timely manner is important to ensure the well-being of their...

This paper examines the relationship between community participation and theefficacy of interventions designed to reduce poverty. We develop some simple analyticsthat are used to structure a review of the extant literature and motivate the analysis of theimpact of participation on the efficacy...

This paper explores risk sharing in the Zone Lacustre, Mali, as viewed throughthe lens of consumption smoothing. We find that idiosyncratic shocks appear to havelittle impact on consumption, and that households respond to these shocks in a variety ofways. In general, nonpoor households are more...

The two basic models used for constructing price indexes for durable assets (such us real estate assets) have been the hedonic and repeated sales models. Case and Quigley (1991)-CQ proposed a generalized least squares (GLS) procedure to estimate a combined (single and repeated sales information)...