S’il est largement reconnu que l’accès à l’électricité joue un rôle important dans la performance des entreprises, les données empiriques sur la question sont mitigées. Qui plus est, peu d’informations sont disponibles concernant les petites et micro-entreprises opérant dans le...

In 2002 Malawi experienced a serious shortage of cereals due to adverse climatic conditions. The World Food Programme assumed that about 2.1 to 3.2 million people were threatened of starvation at that time. However, not much research has been undertaken to investigate the actual consequences of...

The food crisis encountered in 2002 in Malawi was arguably one of the worst in the recent history of the country. The World Food Programme estimated that between 2.1 and 3.2 million people were threatened by starvation. Despite this assumed severity, not much research on the actual consequences...

In 2002 Malawi experienced a serious shortage of cereals due to adverse climatic conditions. The World Food Programme assumed that about 2.1 to 3.2 million people were threatened of starvation at that time. However, not much research has been undertaken to investigate the actual consequences of...

Sharing is a norm in many societies. We present a theoretical model on the trade-off between sharing and investment which we test on data from tailors in Burkina Faso. The empirical results support the idea that there are two behavioural patterns: entrepreneurs following an 'insurance regime'...

Rwanda is among the few countries in Sub-Saharan Africa and the developing approaching universal health insurance coverage. To date, over 90 per cent of the population are enrolled in the Mutuelles de Santé - a system that started off from a number of stand-alone community based health...

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...