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Publications (30)
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This paper discusses dimensions of inequality in sub-Saharan Africa and their causes. It starts with a review of the empirical evidence about inequality during the colonial period as well as the post-independence era. Then it discusses the forces that determine inequality change, focusing on factor...
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– Contextual Differences in the Returns to Bolsa Familia in Brazil
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. Building on Amartya Sen’s work, I assess the...
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– Trends and Measurement
This paper discusses different approaches to the measurement of global interpersonal in equality. Trends in global interpersonal inequality during 1975-2005 are measured using data from UNU-WIDER’s World Income Inequality Database. In order to better understand the trends, global interpersonal...
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This paper proposes a concept of inequality comparisons with ordinal multidimensional categorical data. In our model, one population is more unequal than another when they have common arithmetic median outcomes and the first can be obtained from the second by correlation-increasing switches and/or...
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I investigate the relationship between children’s endowment and parental investment using a rich dataset on a cohort of children from Ethiopia, who were surveyed at ages eight, twelve and fifteen. Children’s endowment is measured by scores on tests of cognitive skills/ability. A child’s enrollment...
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We study the influence of economic inequality on co-operation and aid distribution in community-based development schemes. For this, we organized a field experiment in which community members contributed to a collective effort to attract aid. We find that devolving aid distribution to community...
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– Some Evidence on Intergenerational Occupational Mobility from India
Using data from the India Human Development Survey (IHDS) 2005, we examine intergenerational occupational mobility in India, an issue on which very few systematic and rigorous studies exist. We group individuals into classes and document patterns of mobility at the rural, urban and all-India levels...
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A natural way of viewing an inequality or a poverty measure is in terms of the vector distance between an actual (empirical) distribution of incomes and some appropriately normative distribution (reflecting a perfectly equal distribution of incomes, or a distribution with the smallest mean that is...
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This paper reviews the evidence on the ‘inclusiveness’ of the growth in consumption expenditure that has occurred in India over the last four decades or so. The notion of dynamic inclusiveness is framed in terms of imagined normative allocations of the inter-temporal product of growth, as dictated...
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The present paper is a selective overview, very considerably based on work in which the author himself has been involved, of the difficulties which can arise in the measurement of poverty and inequality when one compares populations of differing size. The paper begins with certain problems attending...
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– A New Guise of Outsourcing and Host Country Effects
The rush for land acquisition—primarily driven by food shortages, food price volatility, and the run for agrofuel—has drawn considerable attention, as documented by reports published in late 2009, 2010, and 2011. Terminological differences aside, it is—quite distinct from material or service...
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Recent research regarding property rights and economic development often treats property rights security in a country as homogeneous, although protecting the private entitlements of some can entail preventing others from claiming and controlling those same resources. This one-dimensional conception...
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– The Case of Mozambique
Measuring poverty remains a complex and contentious issue. This is particularly true in sub-Saharan Africa where poverty rates are higher, information bases typically weaker, and the underlying determinants of welfare relatively volatile. This paper employs recently collected data on household...
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– Recent Global Evidence
The study presents recent global evidence on the transformation of economic growth to poverty reduction in developing countries, with emphasis on the role of income inequality. The focus is on the period since the early/mid-1990s when growth in these countries as a group has been relatively strong...
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– Comparative Path Analysis for Mozambique and Vietnam
While economic growth generally reduces income poverty, there are pronounced differences in the strength of this relationship across countries. Typical explanations for this variation include measurement errors in growth-poverty accounting and countries’ different compositions of economic growth. We...
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– Some Reflections on Variable Population Poverty Measurement
Debates about poverty relief and foreign aid often hinge on claims about how many poor people there are in the world and what constitutes poverty. Good measures of poverty are essential for addressing the world poverty problem. Measures of poverty require a basis for determining who is poor and a...
Displaying 16 of 30 results