Following the economic and legal reforms of the early 1990s, the Government of Mexico has developed new agricultural support programs that promote productivity and facilitate the adjustment process, while not interfering with the market economy put into p

This paper presents a methodology for adjusting measures of income and poverty for the risk faced by a household. The approach draws on the standard economic concept of risk aversion, and it is based on the intuition that households will prefer a steady stream of income to a variable one with...

Indigenous peoples are among the poorest in Latin America, and it is often argued that social policies do not reach them. At the same time, several countries have implemented in recent years new programs for poverty reduction that should have benefited the indigenous. In this paper, we use data...

Provincial and state-level analyses are conducted using panel data sets for Argentina and Mexico to assess the efficiency of provinces and states in improving health and education outcomes. Stochastic frontier estimation methods are used to determine optimal outcomes that could be reached with...

This article proposes graphical methods to determine whether commodity tax changes are "socially improving," in the sense of improving social welfare or decreasing poverty for large classes of social welfare and poverty indices. It also shows how estimators of critical poverty lines and economic...

A key component of Poverty Reduction Strategies in developing countries consists in assessing the needs of the population in terms of access to basic services such as education, health care, and basic infrastructure. Using Demographic and Health Surveys from 40 countries, this note shows that...

Using 19 years of cross-section wage data, we look at two factors that may explain the lower wages earned by women as compared to men in Colombia. First, we observe a long-term trend towards an increase in the gender wage gap which may be related to new labor regulations giving more protection...

This note applies tools from the stochastic dominance literature on poverty to environmental data in order to test in a robust way whether over-consumption and thereby depletion of natural resources is increasing over time. \ The method is illustrated with country data on per capita CO_{2}...

Dans cet article, nous analysons l'impact des politiques de transferts publics sur la pauvreté au Canada et aux états-Unis à l'aide de la base de données du Luxembourg Income Study. Pour ce faire, nous utilisons une méthode basée sur la valeur de Shapley afin de pouvoir attribuer à chaque...

This paper extends familiar results on the optimal pricing of publicly provided goods and price cap regulations in a stochastic dominance framework. The key advantage is that the assessment as to whether pricing or price cap reforms are poverty reducing or welfare improving is not contingent on...