What happened to poverty in India in the 1990s has been fiercely debated, both politically and statistically. The debate has run parallel to the wider debate about globalization and poverty in the 1990s and is also an important part of that debate. The economic reforms of the early 1990s in...

This book presents the key findings from a new poverty assessment for Vietnam, led jointly by the World Bank and the Vietnam Academy of Social Sciences (VASS). It takes a fresh look at the lives of poor men, women, and children, and explores the constraints and opportunities they face today in...

Labour force participation in Pakistan, even amongst prime-aged males, is lower than observed in many similar countries. The analysis of labour force participation in urban Pakistan in this paper indicates that systematic factors explain a fair amount of this participation. The extended family...

An econometric model of poverty incidence is calibrated to 20 household surveys for India's 15 major states spanning 1960-1994. The model builds on past research suggesting that the key determinants of the rate of poverty reduction at state level are agricultural yields, growth of the non-farm...

This paper takes stock of the World Bank's risk and vulnerability analysis from FY2000 to FY2007. It complements recent assessments of Social Protection and Labor (SP&L) sector's lending and analytic activities on labor markets, pensions, social safety nets, and social funds. The review of 155...

People in poor countries live shorter lives than people in rich countries so that, if we scale income by some index of health, there is more inequality in the world than if we consider income alone. Such international inequalities in life expectancy decreased for many years after 1945, and the...

Mortality rates have fallen dramatically over time, starting in a few countries in the 18th century, and continuing to fall today. In just the past century, life expectancy has increased by over 30 years. At the same time, mortality rates remain much higher in poor countries, with a difference...

Within an overlapping generations model of economic growth, the paper asks how the existence of a fixed supply of land or housing, whose price is bid up by economic growth, affects the accumulation of productive capital along the balanced growth of the economy. Land rules out the Golden rule...