Child or early marriage is recognized as an important development and human rights issue that affects girls especially in many developing countries. The practice has been linked to psychological, health, and education risks. These negative impacts explain why in many countries child marriage has...

This article provides a simple framework to analyze the determinants of targeting performance of utility tariffs and applies it to data on electricity in Cape Verde, Rwanda, and Sao Tome and Principe. While most indicators of benefit incidence are silent as of why subsidies are targeted the way...

This note applies tools from the stochastic dominance literature on poverty to environmental data in order to test in a robust way whether over-consumption and thereby depletion of natural resources is increasing over time. The method is illustrated with country data on per capita CO2 emissions.

This article provides a simple framework to analyze the determinants of targeting performance of utility tariffs and applies it to data on electricity in Cape Verde, Rwanda, and Sao Tome and Principe. While most indicators of benefit incidence are silent as of why subsidies are targeted the way...

This paper shows that in Belgium, programs to prevent electricity cuts among the poor often do not reach the poorest. This is less because the poorest cannot benefit from the programs (if they apply, they almost always are granted benefits) than because they often fail to apply for the programs....

This paper analyzes the evolution of poverty in Latin America. In 1998, about a third of the population was poor, and one sixth extreme poor. This represents 179 million poor people, of which 89 million lived in extreme poverty. The share of the populatio

Despite water being subsidized in most developing countries, poorer households end up paying more per unit of consumption because they are generally not connected to the network and, as a result, are forced to buy water from public fountains or street vendors at a higher price. In this note we...

The availability of better data on time use in developing countries makes it important to provide tools for analyzing such data. Conceptually, time poverty can be understood as the fact that some individuals do not have enough time for rest and leisure after taking into account the time spent...

Income variablity is likely to increase wage inequality if poorer households are more vulnerable to shocks. Using a simple method to estimate risk-adjusted measures of wage inequality and data from Mexico, this note shows that safety nets could offset a good part of the impact of risk aversion...

Many private non-profit organizations play an active role assisting the poor. Those organizations often benefit from government subsidies, which makes it important to assess the benefits of their programs. This paper provides a statistical analysis of the characteristics of the clients of a...