As an alternative to traditional subsidy schemes in utility sectors, direct subsidy programs have several advantages: they are transparent, they are explicit, and they minimize distortions of the behavior of both the utility, and the customers. At the same time, defining practical eligibility...

The authors try to determine whether children sent to work in rural Bangladesh are caught in a poverty trap, with the extra income to poor families from child labor coming at the expense of the children's longer-term prospects of escaping poverty through education. The poverty trap argument...

The authors assess whether the placement of bank branches in Bangladesh responds to unexploited potential for nonfarm rural development. They compare the branch location choicesof a large new private nonprofit bank, the famous Grameen Bank, with those of more traditional government banks. They...

An assessment of the welfare gains from a targeted social program can be seriously biased unless it takes proper account of the endogeneity of program participation. Bias comes from two sources of placement endogeneity: the purposive targeting of the geographic areas to receive the program, and...

The authors provide an empirical analysis of the determinants of three child-health outcomes related to the Millennium Development Goals: the infant mortality rate, the child mortality rate, and the prevalence of malnutrition. Using data from Demographic and Health Surveys, they go beyond...

There have been extensive theoretical studies of firms'responses to environmental regulations ad enforcement but few empirical analyses of firms'expenditures on pollution abatement in response to different regulations and enforcement strategies. The authors empirically analyze the pollution...

Public provision of education has often been perceived as universal and egalitarian, but in reality it is not. Political pressure typically results in incidence bias in favor of the rich. The author argues that the bias in political influence resulting from extreme income inequalities is...

Growth is pro-poor if the poverty measure of interest falls. According to this definition there are three potential sources of pro-poor growth: (1) a high rate of growth of average incomes; (2) a high sensitivity of poverty to growth in average incomes; and (3) a poverty-reducing pattern of...

In recent years -as a result of economic contraction, declining employment and real wages, and changes in labor market behavior- Ukraine's tax base of the social security system has declined, threatening its sustainability. About 40 percent of the labor force works in the informal sector, paying...

Labor market integration is typically assumed to improve welfare in the absence of distortions, because it allows labor to move to where returns are highest. The author examines this result in a simple general equilibrium model in the presence of a common property resource: social capital....