Employment elasticity with respect to agriculture value added in South Asia has weakened in recent years. While crop diversification has grown and value added per hectare also grew, employment growth was sluggish. However, the linkages between farm and non-farm employment remain strong. Drawing...

Using National Sample Survey data for rural India we examine the incidence of capture in two workfare programs in rural India: the Rural Public Works and the Food for Work Programs for 1993-94 and 2004-05 respectively. We discover a high degree of program capture among the general population....

Using primary data collected during 2007-08 we examine the nutritional status with respect to the two macronutrients (calories and protein) as well as various micronutrients of rural households in three Indian states: Andhra Pradesh, Maharashtra and Rajasthan. We find that, by and large, there...

Contrary to a widely held view, the targeting of the Employment Guarantee Scheme in the Indian state of Maharashtra was unsatisfactory and worsened over the period 1979–89. Among the participants, from a large group the non-poor became the majority. Some of them were in fact (moderately)...

Summary We test for the existence of a poverty nutrition trap (PNT) in the case of calories and four important micronutrients--carotene, iron, riboflavin, and thiamine--for three categories of wages: sowing, harvesting, and others for male and female workers separately using robust sample...

Recent studies have drawn attention to the high prevalence of stunting among children in rural India. In fact, these estimates point to more pervasive deprivation than conventional measures of poverty based on income or consumption expenditure shortfalls imply. Since stunting reflects cumulative...

This paper focuses on the poverty alleviating potential of the Employment Guarantee Scheme (EGS) in (the Indian state of) Maharashtra. A point of departure is the shift of emphasis from the static to the dynamic effects of the EGS targeting, measured in terms of individuals moving into and out...

Millennium goals aim to halve poverty in developing countries by 2015. As a distinction is not drawn between the persistently and transiently poor, there is a risk that strategies designed to accelerate growth to achieve the desired reduction in an overall index of poverty may be preferred to...

Participation in the Employment Guarantee Scheme (EGS) changed significantly during the period 1979-89. A marked reduction in the share of EGS participants in the labour force was accompanied by a considerably lower proportion of the poor among them. While a small part of the reduction in EGS...

The present study examines how and why ethnic minorities are poorer than ethnic majorities in Vietnam using the Vietnam Household Living Standards Survey data for 2002 and 2004. First, the analysis confirms that households belonging to the ethnic minority groups are not only poorer but also more...