sector employment, uncovered sector employment, and unemployment. The impact of these labor market adjustments on absolute poverty will depend on how the pattern of employment composition changes within households and on how income is shared within households. An earlier paper (Fields and...

The turn to the use of mixed qualitative and quantitative (Q-Squared) methods in the analysis of poverty is a welcome development with large potential payoffs. While the benefits of mixing are not in doubt, the tensions involved in so doing have not received adequate attention. The aim of this...

This paper establishes some general principles of the rationale for development assistance in Middle Income Countries and then applies these principles to the operations of the World Bank. It then puts the argument through its paces for the specific case of India, which has just transitioned...

In his Presidential Address to the European Economic Association, Tony Atkinson introduced the idea of a “Charitable Conservatism” position in public policy, which “exhibits a degree of concern for the poor, but this is the limit of the redistributional concern and there is indifference...

In this paper I offer a conceptualisation of social security and income redistribution schemes which highlights the strong overlaps between the two. Indeed, it is virtually impossible to disentangle the two in practice. The major conclusion is that any assessment of one cannot proceed without...

This paper analyzes serial correlation in stock returns, and informational role of volume and volatility in Polish and Slovakian stock markets. Results indicate that prices tend to overshoot to new information in the Slovakian market, while new information gets impounded into prices with a...

This study focuses on the possible role of microfinance institutions to mobilize savings among the low-income entrepreneurs who already use these organizations as sources of credit. The evidence is drawn from a pilot project carried out in 1997 and 1998 in Kenya and Uganda. Possible constraints...

Microfinance Institutions (MFIs) have risen to the forefront as invaluable institutions in the development process. Nevertheless, capital constraints have hindered the expansion of microfinance programs such that the demand for financial services still far exceeds the currently available supply....

A real option analysis of dry-grind corn ethanol plants compared to a standard net present value analysis (NPV) shows that the option values increase entry prices and lower exit prices of investment and disinvestment considerably. For a large plant, the gross margin of ethanol price over the...

This paper empirically estimates cost functions for two milking technologies, stanchion and parlor, using farm level data from New York dairy farms for the years 1993 through 2002. A translog cost function was estimated along with input cost share equations for each milking technology by...