The United Nations and other aid agencies are calling for aid to be more than doubled so that the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) can be achieved by 2015. Unfortunately, as this paper shows, many important donors currently distribute their aid in ways that are not consistent with the MDGs....

This paper analyses the effects of access to Rural Public Works (RPW) and the Public Distribution System (PDS), a public food subsidy programme, on consumption poverty, vulnerability and undernutrition in India drawing, on the large household datasets constructed with National Sample Survey...

The risk of poverty is a key issue for European countries. Irrespective of the uneven evolution of that risk – a sharp increase in the aftermath of the Great Recession of 2008 followed by an overall decrease in the past few years – people at risk of poverty represent a key target of social...

The past fifty years have been a period of extraordinary food crop productivity growth, despite rising populations and increasing land scarcity, largely due to the Green Revolution. Despite these massive gains in productivity, malnutrition has persisted for close to a billion people in the...

This paper investigates impacts, mechanisms and selection effects of prenatal exposure to multiple shocks, by exploiting the unique natural experiment of the Dutch Hunger Winter. At the end of World War II, a famine occurred abruptly in the Western Netherlands (November 1944 - May 1945),...