The financial sector in rural areas, where most of the poor people in sub-Saharan Africa are found, has transformed massively in recent times, notably through the increased penetration of several types of rural financial intermediaries in addition to rural and community banks and microfinance...

In this paper, we analyse the relationship between China's structural transformation and the inclusiveness of its economic growth. China's economy has undergone significant structural changes since it initiated the economic reforms in 1978. Economic activities have shifted from the...

Despite postulations on the effects of foreign direct investment (FDI), foreign aid, and trade on growth, empirical evidence from extant research has been mixed. The focus of recent research has shifted from the growth effects of these international flows to their poverty reduction effects....

Between 1981 and 2017, real gross domestic product in Thailand grew at an average annual rate of 5.7 per cent. Agricultural output grew more slowly than industry or services, and its gross domestic product share consequently declined. Industry's gross domestic product share increased, and the...

Background: Since the latter part of the 20th Century, countries have been particularly challenged by the trade-off that exists between delivering generous welfare provisions and strong economic growth. Such dynamics have stimulated a need to better understand the causes of income inequality so...

While political dynamics differ greatly from one place to another, rural areas continue to have legitimate grievances. Poverty in rural areas is both more prevalent and more acute than in urban areas - about 80 per cent of the world's extremely poor people live in rural areas.

This paper studies the effects of the Vietnam Hunger Eradication and Poverty Reduction (HEPR) program on school enrolment, using longitudinal data that span over 15 years and a difference-in-differences research design. We find that early treatment (at age 8) increases children enrolment by...

This paper assesses the effects on poverty and inequality of the alternative targeting approaches that Zambia's Social Cash Transfer programme could take as its expansion continues during the period of the country's Seventh National Development Plan (2017-21). It further assesses the domestic...

The primary objective of social protection is to fight poverty and food insecurity. However, there are good theoretical arguments to support the idea that it can also contribute to more complex outcomes, such as social cohesion. This paper investigates the effects of the Tingathe Economic...

We evaluate the impact on household income of Viet Nam's national target programme to build a new countryside for the period from 2010 to 2015. The purpose of the programme is to modernize rural Viet Nam. Given the universal implementation of the programme, we use a quasi-experimental approach...

In an economy with migration, poverty changes are composed of a number of forces, including the income gains and losses realized by the various migration streams. We present a simple but powerful decomposition methodology that uses panel data to measure the contributions of different migration...

The authors assess the role of the multilateral development system and the reforms needed to support the new global agenda. There is an urgency to the reforms. The coming decades will see the largest urban expansion in history. More infrastructure needs to be built in the next 15 years than the...

This empirical study is based on nationally representative cross-sectional survey data gathered to investigate the effect of ethnic diversity on personal and family incomes in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH), a post-conflict society. The 1992–1995 conflict was harmful for ethnic diversity. Yet,...

Over the past two decades consumption inequality has risen within Laos, while absolute poverty incidence halved. The estimated Gini coefficient of private household expenditures per person rose from 0.311 to 0.364. This increase in the sample-based estimate of inequality was statistically...

Six Southeast Asian countries (Cambodia, Lao People's Democratic Republic, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, and Thailand) defied Gunnar Myrdal's pessimistic prognosis in his 1968 volume, Asian Drama, regarding their prospects for development. In the past half-century, these countries raised...

The provision of infrastructure and related services in developing Asia via publi-private partnership (PPP) increased rapidly during the late 1990s. Theoretical arguments support the potential economic benefits of PPPs, but empirical evidence is thin. This paper develops a framework identifying...

While Vocational Education and Training (VET) was almost absent from earlier international development frameworks, the Agenda 2030 and its Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) attach greater importance to it. VET is an integral part of the education SDG (SDG 4) and its transversal role for a...

While the role of commercial banks in financing economic growth and reducing poverty and income inequality is well documented in cross-country setup, the regional variations of the banking services within a country and its association with poverty reduction is understudied. Understanding of the...

The unfinished agenda in the theory and practice of fiscal decentralization is how fiscal decentralization affects the universal plague of poverty reduction in developing economies. Focusing on developing economies especially Ghana, and also employing secondary sources of information, this...

This study investigates the impact of foreign direct investment (FDI) inflows on poverty reduction in Botswana from 1980 to 2014. The main objective of this study is to establish whether FDI plays a positive role in poverty reduction. The study employs autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL)...

Understanding the factors that limit transitions to decent work remains a central concern for policymakers, as changes in the world of work considerably affect the availability and distribution of quality jobs. Many of these global issues are mirrored in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA)....

The financial sector in rural areas, where most of the poor people in sub-Saharan Africa are found, has transformed massively in recent times, notably through the increased penetration of several types of rural financial intermediaries in addition to rural and community banks and microfinance...

In this paper, we analyse the relationship between China's structural transformation and the inclusiveness of its economic growth. China's economy has undergone significant structural changes since it initiated the economic reforms in 1978. Economic activities have shifted from the...

Between 1981 and 2017, real gross domestic product in Thailand grew at an average annual rate of 5.7 per cent. Agricultural output grew more slowly than industry or services, and its gross domestic product share consequently declined. Industry's gross domestic product share increased, and the...

This paper offers an evaluation of a supported women's self help program with over 1.5 million participants in one of the poorest rural regions of the world (Uttar Pradesh, India). Methodologically, it shows how indicators from the direct capability measurement literature can be adapted for...

Poverty-reducing policies ought to prioritize the "deserving" poor, that is, those who do all that can be reasonably expected from them in their circumstances, but fail to achieve a minimum standard of living. To inform such policies, one needs a theory of justice accommodating norms of...

Most countries around the world implement some form of a safety net program for poor households. A widespread concern is that such programs crowd out private-sector jobs. But they could also improve workers' welfare by allowing them to take on more risk, for example through self-employment. This...

Short-term re-election strategies are widely used by governments around the world. This is problematic if governments can maximize their re-election chances by prioritizing short-term spending before an election over long-term reforms. This paper tests whether longer program exposure has a...

In this paper we make estimates of the potential short-term economic impact of COVID-19 on global monetary poverty through contractions in per capita household income or consumption. Our estimates are based on three scenarios: low, medium, and high global contractions of 5, 10, and 20 per cent;...

Administrative failures in anti-poverty programmes are widespread in developing countries. We focus on one such administrative failure - the persistent delay in paying beneficiaries on time in India’s iconic anti-poverty programme, the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA). Using a...

Employment helps reduce the risk of poverty. Through a randomized controlled trial, we evaluate the impact of a conditional cash transfer (CCT) program to low-income families with dependent children on household members' labor supply. Recipients are required to attend labor-market-oriented...

Standard growth incidence curves describe how growth episodes impact on the overall income distribution. However, measuring the pro-poorness of the growth process is complex due to (i) measurement errors and (ii) effect shocks that may hit the percentiles of the income distribution in different...

Policy makers are generally interested in both the anti-poverty impact and the efficiency of reforms. To connect these two dimensions, I measure the poverty gap change per unit of net revenue that tax-benefit reforms produce. To isolate the impact of reforms and account for labour supply...

The paper guides three scenarios of power planning for Vietnam for the 2018-2030 period under CO2 emission targets. The analysis employs a model of energy expansion in the form of an optimization problem with the objective of the discounted entire system cost minimization. With each CO2 emission...

Given its role in affecting financial behavior, financial literacy has received considerable attention from researchers and policy makers alike. This paper employs data from a nationally representative survey in Indonesia to investigate the impact of financial literacy on poverty, which is a...

We nowcast the economic effects of the Covid-19 pandemic and related lock-down measures in the UK and then analyse the distributional and budgetary effects of the estimated individual income shocks, distinguishing between the effects of automatic stabilisers and those of the emergency policy...

This paper offers a new way of assessing government cash transfers using a social welfare function framework. It demonstrates how one can use social welfare functions to measure the efficiency of such program s without requir ing the specif ication of a poverty line or particular poverty...

This paper provides a preliminary assessment of COVID-19's impact on global poverty in the light of the IMF's April 2020 growth forecasts. The analysis shows that the pandemic will have dramatic consequences, eroding many of the gains recorded over the last decade in terms of poverty reduction....

As the 2030 target year for achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) draws closer, development practitioners are increasing their activities in regions where poverty is predominant. In 2018, Nigeria attained an unenviable position of being the country with the highest number of persons...

In this study, we explore the hypotheses that (a) workers' remittances enhance economic growth in Latin American countries, and (b) workers' remittances help reduce poverty in Latin American countries. In recent decades, workers' remittances have become an important source of income for many...