A majority of the poor in Indonesia come from agricultural and self-employed households. Moreover, the largest single contribution to poverty reduction between 1990 and 1993 came from within-sector welfare gains to self-employed farm households. Data show that the role of the labor market in...

Labor allocation to its most efficient use, promoting employment and human capital investment as well as functioning labor markets can contribute to long?term economic growth, poverty reduction and to help workers manage their risks. A labor market policy framework includes both regulations and...

In the absence of household level data on participation in public programs, spending allocations and poverty measures across regions of Morocco are used to infer incidence across poor and non-poor groups and to decompose incidence within rural and urban areas separately, as well as to decompose...

Proposals aimed at improving the welfare of the poor often include indicator targeting, in which non-income characteristics (such as race, gender, or land ownership) that are correlated with income are used to target limited funds to groups likely to include a cincentration of the poor. Previous...

The authors present new estimates of the extent of the developing world's progress against poverty. By the frugal $1 a day standard, they find that there were 1.1 billion poor in 2001-almost 400 million fewer than 20 years earlier. Over the same period, the number of poor declined by more than...

This paper analyzes the dynamics of poverty and income inequality during the recovery phase of the transition that characterized the Republic of Latvia in the late 1990s. Despite a continued rise in income inequality, empirical evidence suggests an improvement in living standards, owing largely...

The author uses household-level data from a nationally representative survey to analyze the impact of nonfarm income on income inequality in rural Egypt. After pinpointing the importance of nonfarm income to the rural poor, the author decomposes total rural income among five sources, nonfarm,...

The authors used distribution data from 109 household surveys done since 1980 in 42 developing and transitional economies to find evidence that high rates of growth in average living standards are associated with higher rates of poverty reduction. The adverse distributional effect of recent...

It is common for central governments, to delegate authority over the targeting of welfare programs to local community organizations - which may be better informed about who is poor, though possibly less accountable for getting the money to the local poor - while the center retains control over...

This study addresses the question of how well Hungary's system of cash social transfers helps prevent or alleviate poverty -whether different types of social transfer, or changes in eligibility rules, might better alleviate poverty. The social safety net in Hungary and other transition economies...