Improved household accessibility to credit is identified as a significant determinant of intra-household re-allocation of labour resources with important implications for productivity, income, and poverty status. However, credit accessibility could also have wider impacts on poverty if it leads...

This paper reviews the pattern of poverty rates and income inequality in El Salvador since the 1990s. It discusses some of the likely factors that explain the reduction in income inequality that has taken place in the country in the last decade, which paradoxically has coincided with the long...

In recent years, policymaking in China has put increasing emphasis on stemming the growth in inequality, which had been fairly steep since the 1980s. Policy action has taken the form of regional development measures and of reforms of various aspects of the social safety net broadly defined. The...

The dearth of studies on quantitative determinants of poverty in Nigeria is a major weak point in the country’s poverty reduction policy and strategy formulation. A recent study in Kogi State of Nigeria revealed that poverty is higher among households that have male heads, are polygamous, have...

Lone mothers are overrepresented among poor people in many European countries. In 1998, in Norway, a welfare reform increased the amount of benefits and introduced working requirements. Using a quasi-experimental model, Mogstad and Pronzato (2012) find a positive effect of the reform on lone...

Income support for working low income families (the ?working poor?) is on top of the political agenda in Switzerland. The current social assistance system is considered inadequate to support working poor households. Labour unions propose the introduction of a general minimum wage, whereas the...

We study three budget-neutral reforms of the German tax and transfer system designed to improve work incentives for people with low incomes: a feasible flat tax reform that provides a basic income which is equal to the current level of the means tested unemployment benefit, and two alternative...

During the last two decades fertility decisions have varied significantly and not uniformly along the income distribution. In this paper we study the effects of these demographic changes on two dimensions of the income distribution -poverty and inequality- by applying microeconometric...

This paper examines the issue of horizontal inequalities in Viet Nam over the past 20 years. Using data from three recent Viet Nam population censuses (1989, 1999, and 2009) and three Viet Nam Household Living Standard Surveys (1998, 2008, 2012), we estimated numerous measures on inequalities...

This paper considers the possibility of mission drift in microfinance; a situation where Microfinance Institutions (MFIs) move away from targeting the poor and towards better-off clients. Using two different measures of poverty, the paper examines whether microfinance institutions in Uganda follow...