This paper adopts the “Rip Van Winkle” stratagem, of asking what differences would be noticed, in the domain of poverty and distribution, by someone who fell asleep in 1987 (the year I published my paper on poverty in the IMF Staff Papers, and woke up only in 2007 (the year I visited the IMF...

In many markets in developing countries, especially in remote areas, middlemen are thought to earn excessive profits. Non-profits come in to counter what is seen as middlemen's market power, and rich country consumers pay a "fair-trade" premium for products marketed by such non-profits. This...

August 1995 - In urban areas of Côte d'Ivoire, human capital is the endowment that best explains welfare changes over time. In rural areas, physical capital - especially the amount of land and farm equipment owned - matters most. Empirical investigations of poverty in developing countries tend...