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...

The dissertation consists of three essays. The main focus is set on semiparametric regression modeling, which embodies the strength of parametric and nonparametric regression models in terms of flexibility, dimensionality and interpretability. The first essay is “Some Recent Advances in...

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 Africa. We...

Der Aufstieg der Schwellenländer ist sichtbar sowohl in der internationalen Entwicklungszusammenarbeit, als auch in den internationalen Wirtschaftsbeziehungen. Hilfsleistungen der Geberländer, die außerhalb des Ausschusses für Entwicklungshilfe der OECD operieren, haben in den letzten Jahren...

Many low income countries are experiencing a “nutrition transition” towards the consumption of more energy-dense, highly processed foods and beverages that are often high in caloric sweeteners, fat and salt. Changing lifestyles and urbanisation have coincided with a ‘retail revolution’,...

Donors of foreign aid increasingly claim to consider gender inequality in the recipient countries to be a serious concern. While aid specifically to promote gender equality receives only a tiny share of aid budgets, allocations to education, health, and civil society projects could be affected...

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...