The authors show how subjective poverty lines can be derived using simple qualitative assessments of perceived consumption adequacy, based on a household survey. Respondents were asked whether their consumption of food, housing, and clothing was adequate for their family's needs. The author's...

In public safety of less concern to poor people? What about people in poor areas? How is demand for public safety affected by income inequality? Is there a self-correcting mechanism whereby higher crime increases demand for public safety? The authors study subjective assessments of public safety...

The authors investigate the extent to which Indonesia's poor benefit from public and private provisioning of education and health services. Drawing on multiple rounds of SUSENAS household surveys, they document a reversal in the rate of decline in poverty and a slowdown in social sector...

Public action to prevent crime is often driven by concerns about public safety. But what generates those concerns ? ]s it crime, or something else ? Using survey data for Brazil, we find that the desire for greater public safety has a positive own-income effect, but a negative neighborhood-...

On the basis of the baseline data collected for the evaluation of the Bolivian Social Investment Fund (SIF) this paper assesses (1) the benefit incidence of the SIF and (2) the quality of the evaluation design. We find that the benefits in education are most equally distributed over the...

This study explores global inequality in health status, and decomposes it into within- and between-country inequality. We rely on standardized height indicators as our health indicator since they avoid the measurement pitfalls of more traditional measures of health such as morbidity, mortality...

Every three years, Indonesia fields simultaneously two nationwide surveys which collect consumption data. One collects consumption using 23 questions, the other using 320 questions. Based on a repeated experiment in which the two questionnaires were randomly assigned across households, I examine...

The Indonesian Healthcard program was implemented in response to the economic crisis, which hit Indonesia in 1998, in order to preserve access to health care services for the poor. The Healthcard provided the households with subsidised care at public health care providers, while the providers...