Little is known about the situation facing widows and their dependent children in West Africa especially after the widow remarries. Women in Malian society are vulnerable to the loss of husbands especially in rural areas. Households headed by widows have significantly lower living standards on...

In the absence of household level data on participation in public programs, spending allocations and poverty measures across regions of Morocco are used to infer incidence across poor and non-poor groups and to decompose incidence within rural and urban areas separately, as well as to decompose...

Viet Nam's ethnic minorities tend to be concentrated in remote areas and have lower living standards than the ethnic majority. How much is this due to poor economic characteristics? Is there a self-reinforcing culture of poverty in the minority group? The authors find that differences in returns...