The literature shows that regional disparities in growth and poverty are often relatively high, that these regional disparities do not necessarily disappear as the economies grow and develop and that these disparities are itself in many cases an important driver of the overall performance of an...

One of the most frequent critiques of the HDI is that it does not take into account inequality within countries in its three dimensions. We use a simple approach, which allows to compute the three components and the overall HDI for quintiles of the income distribution. This allows to compare the...

One of the most frequent critiques of the HDI is that is does not take into account inequality within countries in its three dimensions. We suggest a relatively easy and intuitive approach which allows to compute the three components and the overall HDI for quintiles of the income distribution....

In the middle of the nineties the rural population in Burkina Faso was seriously hit by rising food prices. Whereas cotton farmers were able to cope with this shock given the simultaneous boom in the cotton sector, food crop farmers had to withdraw children from school and to let them work more...

There is a well-known debate about the roles of geography versus institutions in explaining the long-term development of countries. These debates have usually been based on cross-country regressions where questions about parameter heterogeneity, unobserved heterogeneity, and endogeneity cannot...

We propose a new methodology for comparing poverty over multiple periods across time and space that does not arbitrarily aggregate income over various years or rely on arbitrarily specified poverty lines or poverty indices. Following Duclos et al. (2006a), we use the multivariate stochastic...

The purpose of our paper is to derive instructive analytics on how to account for differentials in demographic variables, in particular mortality, when performing welfare comparisons over time. The idea is to apply various ways of `correcting' estimated income distribution measures for `sample...

Lack of knowledge about risk differentials regarding AIDS seriously hampers the study of the economic impact of AIDS in developing countries, at both the macro- and micro-economic levels. In this paper, we derive, we think, reasonable assumptions on mortality risk differentials by age,...

Microsimulation constitutes a particularly powerful instrument for evaluating the distributive impact of macro-economic shocks. All existing models applied to developing countries remain static. I develop a dynamic model able to account for the temporal dimension of macro-economic shocks and...

The empirical evidence shows that in developing countries illness shocks can have a severe impact on household income. Few studies have so fare examined the effects of mortality. The major difference between illness and mortality shocks is that a death of a household member does not only induce...