The paper analyzes the incidence, the severity and the determinants of household poverty in Ukraine during transition using two comparable surveys from 1996 and 2004. We measure poverty using income and consumption and contrast the effects of various poverty lines. Poverty in both periods...

This paper contributes towards the growing debate concerning the world distribution of income and its evolution over that past three to four decades. Our methodological approach is twofold. First, we formally test for the number of modes in a cross-sectional analysis where each country is...

In many developing countries, there does not exist a time series of nationally representative household budget or income surveys, while there often are surveys of regions as well as nationally representative Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) which lack information on incomes. This makes an...

With official development assistance (ODA) set to rise as countries strive to meet the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), aid effectiveness remains an important area of development policy. An increasing number of studies support the notion that ODA can contribute to growth in a nonlinear...

Vulnerability to poverty is a major problem in the rural areas of Sub Saharan Africa. Rural Households are confronted with various covariate and idiosyncratic shocks and are often severely constrained in coping with such events. They frequently resort to food from natural resources such as...

Although trade integration has potential benefits for developing countries, it is disputed whether trade liberalization processes are, per se, sufficient for poverty reduction and inequality abatement. Abundant work has analyzed the link between tariff reduction, poverty levels and inequality in...

This paper uses an unanticipated, exogenous doubling of the legal minimum pension in Ukraine as a unique quasi-experiment to evaluate the income effect on various aspects of labor supply among the elderly. In contrast to previous studies, the unusually simple pension eligibility rule allows...

Using a CGE model, this study analyses the impact of trade liberalization on poverty at the household level taking Ethiopia as a case. Two scenarios (complete tariff cut and uniform tariff scheme) suggest that further liberalization of trade has little short-run effect on the overall economy....

This paper examines the effects of financial development on income inequality and poverty. The results of both cross-country and panel data regressions suggest that inequality and poverty are reduced not only through enhanced loan markets, but also through more developed stock markets. We show...

We provide new micro evidence on the discussion about the relationship between financial development and welfare. Relying on the concept of local financial development our analysis focuses on three dimensions of household welfare: vulnerability to poverty, investment, and consumption smoothing....