Martin Ravallion ("Why Don't We See Poverty Convergence?" American Economic Review, 102(1): 504-23; 2012) presents evidence against the existence of poverty convergence in aggregate data despite the conditional convergence of per capita income levels and the close linkage between growth and...

In this paper, we propose a unified Bayesian approach for multivariate structured additive distributional regression analysis where inference is applicable to a huge class of multivariate response distributions, comprising continuous, discrete and latent models, and where each parameter of these...

Various recent cross-country regressions have detected insignificant or even surprisingly negative effects of schooling on agricultural productivity. Applying advanced panel econometric techniques to a sample of 95 developing and emerging countries from 1961 to 2002, we show that these results...

Abstract: Despite recent improvements in economic performance, undernutrition rates in Africa appear to have improved much less and rather inconsistently across the continent. We examine to what extent there is an empirical linkage between income growth and reductions of child undernutrition in...

The recent food price crisis and the following global economic recession have led to large increase in the number of people to suffer from hunger. While the impacts can be measured with precision ex post, for policy-makers it is critical to get a sense of likely impacts ex ante to plan...

In this paper we investigate the factors affecting income levels, income growth, and poverty reduction in rural Indonesia following the crisis of 1997/98. We particu- larly investigate the relative roles of non-farm incomes, productivity improvements achieved via changes in crops versus...

One reason donors provide foreign aid is to support their exports to aid-recipient countries. Time series data for Germany suggests an average return of between US$1.04-$1.50 for each US dollar of aid spent by Germany. Although this is well below previous estimates, the value is robust to...