We show how differences in aggregate human development outcomes over time and space can be additively decomposed into a pure mean income (growth) component, a component attributed to differences in the distribution of income, and components attributed to ‘non-income’ factors and...

India’s 2005 National Rural Employment Guarantee Act creates a justiciable 'right to work' by promising up to 100 days of wage employment per year to all rural households whose adult members volunteer to do unskilled manual work. Work is provided in public works projects at the stipulated...

The policy reforms called for in the transition from a socialist command economy to a developing market economy bring both opportunities and risks to a country's citizens. In poor economies, the initial focus of reform efforts is naturally the rural sector, which is where one finds the bulk of...

How much economic mobility is there across generations in a poor, primarily rural, economy? How much do intergenerational linkages contribute to current inequality? We address these questions using original survey data on Senegal that include an individualized measure of consumption. While...

International organizations pursue multiple objectives in hiring policies including cultural diversity, reducing costs and avoiding discrimination among which there can be sharp trade-offs. The paper studies how these trade-offs are resolved in the World Bank's hiring processes. It estimates...

The de-collectivization of Vietnamese agriculture was a crucial step in the country's transition to a market economy. The assignment of land-use rights had to be decentralized and local cadres ostensibly had the power to capture this process. We assess the realized land allocation against...

If the gains from investment depend on knowledge, but households cannot hire skills, then poorly educated households will achieve lower returns than educated ones. If the income-poor are less well educated, then they will also have lower returns to investment. The paper tests this argument for...

Are the household characteristics that are good for the transition to a more diversified market-oriented economy in Vietnam also important for reducing poverty? Or are there trade-offs? The determinants of both poverty incidence and participation in rural off-farm activities are modeled as...

We assess impacts of rural road rehabilitation on market development at the commune level in rural Vietnam and examine the geographic, community, and household covariates of impact. Double difference and matching methods are used to address sources of selection bias in identifying impacts. The...