Government and the private sector have complementary roles in promoting development and in fighting poverty.

A poverty line helps focus the attention of governments and civil society on the living conditions of the poor. In practice, there is typically not one monetary poverty line but many, reflecting the fact that poverty lines serve two distinct role. One role is to determine what the minimum level...

This paper is concerned with the derivation of a welfare indicator for households from consumption data. It examines, illustrating with reference to data for ecuador, several of the steps involved in contructing consumption aggregates and highlights some of the principles which should guide the...

much new work has been devoted to deriving and extending decomposable inequality and poverty measures which bridge the gap between description and analysis by throwing light on the processes undergirding inquality and poverty. For example, an application that has obvious policy relevance in the...

This manual explains the planning process, technical procedures, and standards used in Living Standard Measurement Study (LSMS) household surveys, including what these procedures entail, why they are used, and how they can be implemented.

Though Vietnam has made impressive progress in providing widespread access to basic social services, the quantity and quality of the country's social service provision have shown signs of deterioration within the last two decades. This paper examines the changing role of the public sector in...

This discussion paper constructs a consistent, nationwide poverty profile of Cambodia to support the government's effort to strengthen the design of poverty reduction policies. Basic data are given on the level and distribution of living standards as measured by per capita household consumption...

Despite impressive success in improving living conditions in many Caribbean countries, poverty still persists throughout the region. This study seeks to improve our understanding of poverty in the Caribbean and the current efforts to address it. It analyzes the causes and characteristics of...

Comparison between Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) and East Asia indicates that gender inequality in education and employment is estimated to have reduced SSA's per capita growth in the 1960-92 period by 0.8 percentage points per year. Therefore reducing gender-based asset inequality in SSA is an...