Working Paper
Can the Context Mediate Macro-Policy Outcomes?
Local institutional and structural (meso) factors can play a role in mediating the returns to a macro-social policy. I focus on the Brazilian cash-transfer-programme Bolsa Familia and check how contextual features influence the returns to transfers...
Working Paper
Social Transfers and Growth
The effects of social transfers on growth are still unclear. The limitations of aggregated data at sub-national levels have confined the analysis to the use of simulation models and household surveys. As an alternative, this paper contributes to the...
Working Paper
Welfare Changes in China during the Economic Reforms
The study examines welfare changes in China during the reform period (1978- ) by analysing various welfare indicators, the causes of change, and the shifting models. It provides an empirical case to the general debate over the relationship between...
Journal Article
The Impact of the Global Commodity and Financial Crises on Poverty in Vietnam
Economic growth in Vietnam was resilient to the global commodity and financial crises, but it is unclear why. Impacts on employment and poverty are also disputed. We develop a dynamic computable general equilibrium model to decompose growth and...
Working Paper
Undernutrition in Sub-Saharan Africa
The predominant perception is that the world's food problems are now concentrated in Sub-Saharan Africa. Declining food production and recurrent famine in many African countries are the focal points of much recent work on food problems. This paper...
Working Paper
Underdevelopment, Transition and Reconstruction in Sub-Saharan Africa
Reconstructing Africa's war damaged economies is an urgent task. This is especially so in a group of countries - Angola, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Guinea-Bissau, and Mozambique - which must also complete their economic and political transition from state...
Working Paper
Market Responses to Anti-Hunger Policies
The way markets respond to anti-hunger policies can have considerable bearing on their effectiveness. This paper investigates market responses to various policies, including direct transfer payments, relief work, food pricing policies, public grain...
Working Paper
External Imbalances, Famines And Entitlements
The study proceeded by broadly categorizing the various defects of the economy as manifestations of two disequilibria in the system. The first disequilibrium pertains to the internal imbalances as reflected mainly by the stagnation in economic growth...
Working Paper
Poverty and Growth in the WAEMU after the 1994 Devaluation
This paper brings out that poverty increased massively in the wake of the 1994 devaluation of the CFA franc, despite a significant recovery of economic growth. Although this increase affected all the social groups, it fell mostly on the urban poor...
Working Paper
Poverty Measures and Anti-Poverty Policy with an Egalitarian Constraint
Bourguignon and Fields (‘Poverty Measures and Anti-Poverty Policy’) and Gangopadhyay and Subramanian (‘Optimal Budgetary Intervention in Poverty Alleviation Schemes’) have derived optimal budgetary rules for the redress of poverty through direct...
Working Paper
Some Simple Analytics of Poverty Redress through Direct Income Transfers and Wage Employment Programmes
This paper is a review and commentary, from both ethical and informational perspectives, of some known results in optimal anti-poverty budgetary rules for two kinds of intervention, direct income transfers and wage employment programmes.
Working Paper
Hunger and Entitlements
Hunger is not a recent phenomenon. Nor is famine. Life has beenshort and hard in much of the world, most of the time. Bothchronic undernourishment and recurrent famines have been amongthe causal antecedents of the brutishness and brevity of human...
Working Paper
Uzbekistan
Uzbekistan is typically seen as one of the slowest reformers among the countries in transition from central planning to a market-oriented economy. This paper evaluates the welfare impact of gradual transition in Uzbekistan, asking whether it has...
Blog
Inequality in South Africa - An Interview with Murray Leibbrandt
by
Roger Williamson
April 2015
At the UNU-WIDER Inequality conference September 2014 we interviewed Murray Leibbrandt, Professor of Economics at the University of Cape Town on...
Working Paper
Targeting Social Transfer Programmes
Identifying the poorest for selection into social transfer programmes is a major challenge facing programme implementers. An innovative cash transfer programme in northern Kenya trialed three targeting mechanisms to learn lessons about which approach...
Working Paper
Fungibility and the Choice of Aid Modalities
The ‘right’ choice of instruments and modalities to provide aid to developing countries in support of poverty reduction and economic development is arguably the most contested issue in the current international debate on aid effectiveness. A...
Working Paper
Elite Capture or Capture Elites? Lessons from the 'Counter-elite' and 'Co-opt-elite' Approaches in Bangladesh and Ghana
Community-based development has been criticized for its inadequate understanding of power relationships at the local level, which thus leaves room for elite capture. This paper compares and contrasts two case studies, both of which take power...
Working Paper
Globalization and Exclusionary Urban Growth in Asian Countries
This paper overviews the debate on the relationship between the measures of globalization, economic growth and pace of urbanization, and speculates on its impact on the quality of life and poverty in the context of Asian countries. After experiencing...
Working Paper
Globalizing Households and Multi-ethnic Community Building in Japan
The East Asian countries are currently experiencing declining fertility rates and aging of their populations. The demographic transition is beginning to affect various societal functions, and increasing international migrants are becoming one of the...
Working Paper
Making Debt Relief Conditionality Pro-Poor
This paper considers how the conditionality inherent in HIPC debt relief should be constituted to promote pro-poor policies. There are two dimensions to this. First, the extent to which the policies proposed are pro-poor. Second, the potential for...
Working Paper
Do Public Transfers Crowd Out Private Transfers?
The paper will use the data from the PROGRESA evaluation to show the extent to which such a programme crowds out private transfers. An interesting aspect of the paper is the fact that it can use the randomization (one-third of the villages in the...
Working Paper
Inequality and Poverty in Africa in an Era of Globalization
This paper describes changes over the past 15-20 years in non-income measures of wellbeing—education and health—in Africa. We expected to find, as we did in Latin America, that progress in the provision of public services and the focus of public...
Working Paper
Can New Aid Modalities Handle Politics?
Are recent donor approaches compatible with a political understanding of policy processes in partner or recipient countries? This question is given increased urgency with the recent calls for and commitment to increasing financial flows, scaling-up...
Working Paper
The Determinants of Child Weight and Height in Sri Lanka
Reducing child malnutrition is a key goal of most developing countries. To combat child malnutrition with the right set of interventions, policymakers need to have a better understanding of its economic, social and policy determinants. While there is...
Book
The Political Economy of Hunger
This book is the third of three volumes. Every year millions of people are losing their lives around the world, undeterred by the widespread opulence and remarkably higher per capita income, because of sporadic famines, endemic undernourishment, and...
Working Paper
Prospects for 'Pro-Poor' Growth in Africa
This paper examines trends in income distribution and its linkages to economic growth and poverty reduction in order to understand the prospects for achieving poverty reduction in Africa. We examine the levels and trends in income distribution in...
Working Paper
Evaluating Targeting Efficiency of Government Programmes
This paper suggests how the targeting efficiency of government programmes may be better assessed. Using the ‘pro-poor policy’ (PPP) index developed by authors, the study investigates the pro-poorness of not only government programmes geared to the...
Working Paper
Impact of the Global Commodity and Financial Crises on Poverty in Vietnam
Economic growth in Vietnam has been fairly resilient to the global commodity and financial crises, but it is unclear why. In addition, the impact of the crises on employment and poverty is in dispute. We develop a dynamic computable general...