Working Paper
Keep it real
This paper investigates how two effects drive wedges between nominal and real inequality estimates. The effects are caused by (i) differences in the composition of consumption over the income distribution coupled with differential inflation of...
Working Paper
Savings By and For the Poor
The poor can and do save, but often use formal or informal instruments that have high risk, high cost, and limited functionality. This could lead to undersaving compared to a world without market or behavioural frictions. Undersaving can have...
Working Paper
Inequality of Opportunity During the Great Recession in Uganda
The paper proposes an analysis of the recent distributional dynamics in Uganda. This analysis is performed by endorsing an opportunity egalitarian perspective, in order to evaluate the outcome dynamics of specific groups of the population and infer...
Working Paper
Growth and Inequality in the Distribution of India’s Consumption Expenditure
This paper undertakes an assessment of the evolution of inequality in the distribution of consumption expenditure in India over the last quarter-century, from 1983 to 2009-10, employing data available in the quinquennial ‘thick’ surveys of the...
Working Paper
Economic Shocks, Impoverishment and Poverty-Related Mortality during the Eastern European Transition
This paper aims to assess the impact that the impoverishment process has had on IPD health dynamics and micronutrient-related morbidity via the changes which have occurred in food consumption in terms of average intake, its distribution and the...
Working Paper
Rural-Urban Dimensions of Inequality Change
For developing and transitional countries we explore trends in rural-urban, intrarural and intraurban inequality of income, poverty risk, health and education. In particular, we ask whether behind generally rising inequality post-1980 lie offsetting...
Working Paper
Price Scissors, Rationing, and Coercion
This paper re-examines the current debate on price scissors based on an extended framework, in which the production and trade of industrial consumer goods within the rural sector is incorporated. It confirms that in the economy considered by...
Working Paper
Conspicuous consumption for social parity
The extant literature on status-signalling primarily adopts Veblen’s theory of class to caste and racial identities. This study aims to adopt a more suitable theoretical lens that is more relevant not only for class identities, but also for other...
Working Paper
The evolution of inequality in Mozambique
After decades of war, ending in 1992, Mozambique embarked on a path of sustained economic growth and substantial poverty reduction. However, these positive dynamics started to revert from 2015, with per capita growth rates getting close to zero and...
Working Paper
Income and price elasticities of demand in South Africa
This paper investigates the expenditure patterns of South African households using detailed cross-sectional expenditure and price data. Linear expenditure system (LES) parameter estimates are used to calculate income and price elasticities for a...
Working Paper
Foreign Aid, Public Sector and Private Consumption
This paper employs a cointegrated vector autoregressive model to assess the growth effect of aid in Uganda over the period 1972-2008. Results show that aid in Uganda has had both direct and indirect beneficial association with growth; that it is the...
Working Paper
A Phoenix in Flames?
This paper challenges the idea that farmers revert to subsistence farming when confronted with violence from civil war. Macro-economic evidence on economic legacies of civil war suggests that civil wars, while obviously disastrous in the short run...