The thesis consists of four essays in the broad spectrum of development economics. While the first three essays are in the sphere of poverty measurement, the fourth essay is on the topic of trade and development. In recent years, the issue of international poverty measurement gained in...

The wave of upbeat stories on the developing world's emerging middle class has reinvigorated a debate on how social class in general and the middle class in particular ought to be defined and empirically measured. With the aim of adding clarity to this debate, this dissertation provides a...

This paper critically reviews the recent changes to the Global Poverty numbers generated by the World Bank in 2008. While they have little impact on observed poverty trends and while there are good reasons to believe that the previous numbers were on weak foundations, the new numbers on levels...