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...
Working Paper
Poverty and the Welfare Costs of Risk Associated with Globalization
‘Globalization’ implies change, and uncertainty over future change may affect household welfare. We use data on Lorenz curves over the last fifty years for a sample of 53 (mostly developing) countries. Treating each country-quintile-year as an...
Working Paper
Food Security in Vietnam during the 1990s
Analysing the performance of ten developing countries, Hoddinot and Yohannes (2002) find a strong association between two measures of food security (calorie intake and mostly dietary diversity) and the increase in expenditures per capita. Using...
Working Paper
Finance and Poverty in Ethiopia
In this paper, using the rich household panel data of urban and rural Ethiopia that covers the period from 1994 to 2000, we attempted to establish the link between finance and poverty in Ethiopia. Our results show that access to finance is an...
Working Paper
Housing and Personal Wealth in a Global Context
Housing is the single most important component of personal wealth in most countries. The special characteristics of housing markets are therefore key to understanding personal portfolios, saving, the household distribution of wealth, and the monetary...
Working Paper
Income and consumption inequality in China
We analyse income and expenditure distribution in China in a comparative perspective with India. These countries represent extreme cases in the relationship of inequality to both wellbeing indicators. Income is more highly concentrated than...
Working Paper
Externalities in Rural Development
The paper tests for external effects of local economic activity on consumption and income growth at the farm household level using panel data from four provinces of post-reform rural China. The tests allow for nonstationary fixed effects in the...
Working Paper
The Reliability of Small Area Estimation Prediction Methods to Track Poverty
Tracking poverty is predicated on the availability of comparable consumption data and reliable price deflators. However, regular series of strictly comparable data are only rarely available. Poverty prediction methods that track consumption...
Working Paper
Looking for Answers to the Food Security Problem
Food insecurity at the household level has become unacceptable in India where the economy is growing at high rates and food sufficiency is already achieved at the macro-level. Food security has always been an important issue in the Indian political...
Working Paper
Inequality in India
This paper contributes to the literature by reviewing levels, trends, and structure of inequality since the early 1990s in India. It draws extensively on the existing literature, supplemented with analyses of multiple data sources, to paint a picture...
Working Paper
Environmental Taxation and Revenue for Development
This paper considers the role of global environmental taxes both as instruments for improving the global environment and as a source of revenue for funding economic development. It reviews the general case for environmental taxes and the particular...
Working Paper
Is It What You Inherited Or What You Learnt?
Using original survey data on Senegal that include an individualized measure of consumption, we study the role played by land inheritance, other bequests and parental background as influences on an adult’s economic welfare and economic activities...
Working Paper
Measuring Vulnerability to Poverty
Many argue that poverty is intimately linked with ‘vulnerability’. Still, there is no consensus about how to define and measure ‘vulnerability’. We review theory and describe strengths and limits of recently proposed measures. We then propose a...
Working Paper
The Changing Pattern of Undernutrition in India
This study analyses the changes in prevalence of undernutrition between the 1980s and 1990s at the national and sub-national levels in India and focuses on the rural-urban comparisons. The study exploits the demographic information available in...