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This paper analyzes household data from nine programs in the Sahel region using a harmonized approach to compare Proxy-Means Testing (PMT) and Community-Based Targeting (CBT) as conducted in practice, once geographical targeting has been applied. Results show that the targeting performance measured depends critically on the definition of the targeting objectives, share of beneficiaries selected, and indices used to evaluate targeting. While PMT performs better in reaching the poorest households based on per capita consumption, it differs little from CBT, random or universal selection when distribution-sensitive measures are employed, or when food security is used as the welfare metric. Administrative costs associated with targeting represent only a small share of budgets. Results emphasize the importance of studying programs as implemented in practice instead of relying on simulations of targeting performance. They also suggest that PMT and CBT contribute little to poverty or food insecurity reduction efforts in poor and homogeneous settings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Benin has witnessed significant economic growth over the past decades, positioning itself as a rising economy in the west African subregion. This notwithstanding, persistent subnational differences in poverty were observed, suggesting a challenge of growth inclusiveness. This study provides evidence on the effects of human capital differences, isolation, and institutional quality on the determinants of household expenditure and factors that explain the southern-northern welfare gaps. This study employs a decomposition technique based on re-centred influence functions. I find significant spatial differences in consumption expenditure at the mean and across selected quantiles, with an increasing gap along welfare distribution and driven largely by differences in the returns to households' endowments in social public infrastructure. Access to energy and human capital measured by the education level of the head of the household generally favours the rich in the leading region and contributed significantly to explaining the difference in the welfare gap. The difference in access to roads widens the gap for the poor, whereas governance quality at the local level reduces it. To reduce the poverty gap, a public policy to improve returns of household endowments in the social sector should be integrated with other initiatives to address the underlying determinants of inequalities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses poverty dynamics and checks for the existence of poverty traps among refugee and host communities living close to each other in Uganda. Although some non-linearities emerge in asset dynamics, there is convergence towards one stable equilibrium for the whole sample that suggests the existence of a structural poverty trap. However, households are quite heterogeneous: when analysing refugees and hosts separately, refugees converge to a lower own-group equilibrium than hosts. The household size and education are asset growth enablers for both communities. Noticeably, access to land, past history and social cohesion are also significant correlates of refugees' asset dynamics. From a policy perspective, structural poverty traps are bad news, because standard anti-poverty interventions would not unlock the trap. Our results stress the need of more structural approaches aimed at promoting economic growth in the whole area where refugee and host communities live, targeting both communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Uganda is home to 1.5 million refugees from DRC, Burundi, South Sudan and other countries. The Uganda political framework is one of the most progressive and inclusive toward refugees. Only a fraction of the refugees is likely to revert to their home countries. The papers collected in this special issue assess Uganda's progressive refugee policy with reference to how it functioned in the era of COVID-19 using a unique panel data collected between 2017 and 2021. The findings of the special issue stress that the support to refugees and hosts is helping to manage daily challenges but not to ultimately get them out of poverty. Further, this support was insufficient to provide a comprehensive response to COVID-19. For the long-term sustainable integration and development, new policy approaches are needed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper studies educational aspirations and grade achievements of teenagers in India, using Structural Equation Modelling with data from the Young Lives Study. The analysis differentiates direct effects of relevant socio-economic and individual characteristics on educational output from indirect effects through aspirations. In this sample, some student characteristics – parents' education, mothers' caste and the student's gender – have no direct effect on educational output, but an indirect effect on educational aspirations going through abilities. Students from disadvantaged backgrounds, and in particular girls, are at a disadvantage at age 12 because they have accumulated lower cognitive abilities. Abilities shape aspirations, which then impact educational output beyond the mere effect of abilities. Girls are at a double disadvantage: besides lower average skills at age 12, they developed lower aspirations than boys of the same characteristics. The economic situation of the household was neither directly nor indirectly related with students' achievements in school. These results help distinguish aspirations as drivers of behaviour from aspirations as correlates of other characteristics, and they have relevant policy implications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We consider the relationships between multidimensional and monetary poverty indices in international and national poverty profiles, and empirically explore the consequences of identifying poor people relying on a combination of both approaches. Taking first a cross-country perspective, focusing on 90 countries in the developing world, we corroborate that the incidence of poverty by money metrics and the global Multidimensional Poverty Index, a non-monetary measure of poverty, are correlated. Digging deeper, we use microdata from six countries—Bolivia, Brazil, Ecuador, Ethiopia, Ghana, and Uganda—to study the joint densities of monetary and multidimensional welfare and the poverty identification mismatches for a comprehensive array of poverty line pairs. Mismatches are important, particularly in the poorer countries. Although mismatches could be avoided by combining both approaches in a dual cutoff-based poverty measure, the choice of the monetary poverty line remains a considerable issue as it changes the nonmonetary composition of poverty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Vulnerability to poverty is a measure of the downside risk of falling into poverty. We examine the relationship between vulnerability to poverty and self-reported mental health, using a four-wave longitudinal panel from rural Vietnam. Our findings indicate that vulnerability to poverty has a significant and adverse connection with an index of depression. The impacts are not only statistically significant but also large. An increase in vulnerability to poverty from zero to one is associated with a 3.3 unit increase in the depression (CES-D) score (or 47.1 percent increase over the sample mean). Moreover, vulnerability to poverty also increases the probability of being severely mentally distressed. An increase in vulnerability to poverty of one standard deviation is associated on average with a 10.5 percentage point increase in the probability of severe mental distress. Risks of poverty that come from idiosyncratic shocks have stronger links to mental health than risks from covariate shocks. Vulnerability to poverty increases the likelihood of depressive symptoms more for men than for women and for the major ethnicity group compared to other ethnicities. Overall, we provide clear evidence that lives marked by greater downside risk are also blemished with higher rates of depressive symptoms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using microsimulations this paper analyzes the poverty and tax implications of replacing current transfers and subsidies by a budget-neutral (no change in the fiscal deficit) universal basic income program (UBI) in Brazil, Chile, India, Russia, and South Africa. We consider three UBI transfers with increasing levels of generosity and identify scenarios in which the poor are no worse off than in the baseline scenario of existing social transfers. We find that for poverty levels not to increase under a UBI reform, the level of spending must increase substantially with respect to the baseline. Accordingly, the required increase in tax burdens is high throughout. We find that the increase in the average tax rate that would be consistent with not hurting the poor is almost universally above 30%, limiting the feasibility of a UBI reform due to political resistance and efficiency costs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we evaluate the impact of road development on household welfare in rural Papua New Guinea (PNG) between 1996 and 2010, using two geocoded cross-sectional national household surveys and corresponding road maps. We make use of time-variation in road surface type and condition as recorded in PNG's National Road Asset Management System, focusing on routes that connect rural households to urban areas. To tackle endogenous placement of road infrastructure programs, we employ a correlated random effects model that controls for the location-specific average road quality over the period of analysis. We also use a newly developed generalised quantile regression method to investigate whether road works favour the poor. Our estimates show that better roads to nearest towns lead to higher consumption levels and housing quality, and to less reliance on subsistence farming. The effects are stronger among poor and remote households. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The regional concentration of poverty and the resulting disparities in living conditions create conditions where educational inequalities are intensified. These adverse conditions could lead teachers to refuse to work in disadvantaged locations that are characterised by high incidences of poverty and low-performing students. In this paper, we estimate how poverty in the districts where the schools are situated influences the probability that teachers accept a job offer in Costa Rica. Working with data on contract offers acceptance or rejection is a methodological novelty that makes it possible to dissociate students' poverty from the poverty of the schools' location. The estimation of a three‐level hierarchical model allows us to deal with aggregation bias and unobserved heterogeneity. The results show evidence that district poverty is a key determinant of teachers' rejection of offers. Although the study uses data from Costa Rica, the results indicate more generally, how educational inequity can perpetuate poverty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We analyze the effect on poverty of a significant increase in the minimum wage using a quasi-experimental situation in Mexico. In January 2019, the Mexican government announced an increase in the minimum wage: in most of the country it increased by 16 per cent, while in 43 municipalities along the U.S. border it increased by 100 per cent. Using household surveys and the official method for calculating labor income poverty, we implement difference-in-difference and synthetic control methodologies to estimate whether this policy affected poverty in Mexico. We find that poverty along the border decreased by 2.6–3.0 percentage points (11–13 per cent) due to the larger increase in the minimum wage. Poverty was reduced mainly by reducing the flow from non-poverty into poverty. However, poverty intensity increased, mainly because the policy did not affect the share of families without labor income among the poorest households. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The analysis of household wealth dynamic remains an important methodology in the identification of poverty traps. To overcome measurement issues in survey data, livelihoods-based approaches of the dynamics of poverty are typically examined using panel regressions of a livelihoods regression on household assets and other socio-economic factors over time. In this paper, we characterise the livelihoods regression as a 'livelihoods technology', and use a latent class-technology approach to account for heterogeneity in how households generate a livelihood. We use a detailed dataset from rural India covering 213 households across 2001–2014, and control for selection issues through a Heckman Selection model. Our results are the first in the wealth dynamics literature to show that substantial heterogeneity exists in the technologies with which households generate their livelihoods. Importantly, we show that accounting for heterogeneity in household livelihoods 'technologies' more readily identifies different equilibria in wealth levels and provides previously foregone information on who is poor and why they remain poor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

All members of the United Nations have pledged to achieve no poverty and zero hunger within the sustainable development goals (SDG) agenda by 2030. This study looks at the SDG objectives and linkages between poverty, food insecurity, and education. We constructed a composite food security index to capture the multidimensional concept of food security. The link between poverty and food security is then examined using the new food security index and the robustness of the link is compared with the conventional unidimensional food security measure. Using a recursive, simultaneous-equations model and data from a nationally representative household survey in Cameroon, we find a strong link at the national and in both urban and rural regions. The results show the important driver role of education, better education not only contributes to poverty reduction but also enhances food security. The absolute marginal effects of tertiary education are clearly stronger in rural areas. Compared to access to credit, the benefits of education are much more substantial. These findings are in favour of an integrated and targeted approach to address food security and emphasise the driver role of education in enabling sustainable development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Well-functioning cadasters help to secure property rights, make economies perform more efficiently and promote environmental conservation. However, their equity effects are less known. Our study addresses how and to what extent cadasters, and reforms to them, affect equity. We address this question through an ex-ante simulation methodology using static partial equilibrium fiscal incidence analysis. We apply it to a recent expansion of the cadaster in Colombia, designed as a deliberate equalisation strategy in one of the world's most unequal countries. This expansion will increase the collection of property taxes paid by previously informal households by about US$ 22.1 million and their net worth by about US$ 4,993 million (or about 3.2 and 4.9 per cent of their baseline value). However, the expansion of the cadaster will also increase the incidence of poverty (by 0.25 per cent points), the poverty gap (by 0.20 per cent points) and inequality (by 0.12 per cent points of the Gini index), unless generous compensatory interventions are applied. We conclude that equity effects of cadasters are complex and multiple. Policy-wide, compensatory measures are needed to alleviate the immediate impacts on poverty and inequality after the increase in taxes that vulnerable and poor households will likely face following a cadaster reform. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this study, we analyse geo-coded climate data matched with two rounds of household surveys from Mauritania to compare the impact of the 2008 and 2014 droughts on rural households' welfare and the adaptation strategies they employed. The 2008 and 2014 droughts differ sharply in intensity. The 2008 drought was localised with about 45% rural households reporting loss of livestock. In contrast, the 2014 drought was the worst in a decade and affected nearly all parts of the country. We find that households living in the districts where the 2014 drought was at least one standard deviation more intense relative to the district's long-term precipitation average have an 11.9% lower per capita consumption and 8.9% higher likelihood of falling below the poverty line compared to households which faced less-intense drought. We observe no such welfare losses during the 2008 drought. Change in household asset portfolio sheds light on these findings: Household wealth fell during both periods of drought, implying that farm households attempted to maintain consumption by liquidating assets, especially livestock. However, ownership of small ruminants grew, suggesting a greater reliance on more drought-resistant livestock species. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite record economic growth in the decade that followed the fall of the Taliban regime, poverty remained stubbornly high in Afghanistan, declining substantially only in regions that suffered more from conflict. This paper aims to explain this apparent puzzle by combining conflict-related indicators at the province level with household level observations. Estimates, which start in 2007 and stop in 2014 because of data availability constraints, show that large troop deployments reduced conflict intensity but also boosted local consumption, an effect reinforced by foreign aid flows being larger in conflict-affected areas. The robustness of these findings is assessed through an out-of-sample simulation of the impact of declining international troops and foreign aid after 2014. The simulation accurately predicts the sharp deterioration in living standards uncovered by a 2016 household survey. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Understanding how poverty persists and how this affects environmental reliance has policy implications for poverty reduction and environmental conservation. Employing a panel data-set from rural Nepal, we shed light on this issue, using a combination of parametric and nonparametric models. Results show that, as a population, households will converge at a single equilibrium point in the long-term, hence indicating the absence of a poverty trap. The exact asset level of this single equilibrium point, which indicates the absence of a poverty trap, varies between groups of households (for example, based on location, marital status). Based on the convergence point of the entire study population, two groups of households are identified: one situated above the convergence point and another situated below the point. Total environmental income, that is, all income from forest and non-forest environments, is very important to households below the convergence point. Although total environmental income is not a major contributor to asset accumulation, its non-forest component is a significant and positive contributor. We attribute the importance to their looser restriction to access, than for forest resources. Hence, securing greater access to forests without affecting the conservation priorities will help improve the contribution of forest resources to poverty reduction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates whether aspirations matter for education, which offers a common route out of poverty. We find that mother aspirations are strongly related to the child's grade achieved at age 18. The relation is nonlinear, suggesting there is a threshold, and depends on caste, household income and the village setting. The coefficients remain large and significant when applying control function estimation, using first born son as instrument. A similar strong relation is observed with learning outcomes, including local language, English and maths test results, and with attending school, but not with attending private education. These results are confirmed for outcomes at age 15. The findings provide direct evidence on the contribution of mother aspirations to children's education outcomes and point to aspirations as a channel of intergenerational mobility. They suggest that education outcomes can be improved more rapidly by taking aspirations into account when targeting education programmes, and through interventions that shape aspirations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Index-based insurance can have welfare-enhancing effects through two pathways: by inducing policyholders to change their investment and risk-management decisions or by mitigating weather-related shocks through payouts. Most studies fail to distinguish between these two; thus, we know little about which effects dominate and their long-term welfare implications. This study uses a random distribution of discount coupons and drought events that trigger payouts as exogenous variations in order to identify both the ex ante risk-management and ex post payout effects of index-based livestock insurance in a pastoral-dominant society of northern Kenya, where the literature has detected asset-based poverty traps, represented by bifurcated herd-size dynamics. We find that, first, both risk-management and payout effects help reduce the probability of distress sales of livestock. Second, payout effects also reduce the slaughter of livestock. Finally, while payout effects remain robust for the sub-sample of poorer households below the poverty-trap threshold, statistically significant risk-management effects on reduced livestock sales disappear for them. Overall, our results suggest that insurance payouts can help the poor escape poverty traps, while the impact of behavioural changes accompanied by insurance purchases is more subtle in our settings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study analyses the linkage between the recent rural road development and household welfare, resilience, and economic conditions in Ethiopia. The empirical approach relies on a difference-in-differences matching method, taking advantage of a nationally representative household survey and an original road database, both of which are panel data spanning the period 2012–2016. The results of the econometric analysis suggest that Ethiopia's rural road development was associated with a significant increase in household welfare or significant smaller losses in household consumption during the severe droughts. In addition, rural roads in very remote areas were associated with farmers' sales of a larger share of their harvests and higher chance of fertiliser use. Rural road development was also associated with a higher likelihood of earning income from wage employment, particularly for women and youth. Taken together, the results suggest that, by connecting remote communities to markets and the main road network, rural roads have substantially supported the welfare and resilience of rural households in shock-prone Ethiopia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We thank Santos and her colleagues for their comments and welcome debate about the best ways to improve the measurement of multidimensional poverty in Latin America. This means that bootstrapping results cannot be interpreted to mean that the same poverty headcount would be found if the survey was repeated, i.e. the reliability of the poverty headcount measure. The selection of indicators of poverty We agree with Santos and Villatoro ([17]) on the utility of adopting the Latent Variable Method Exploratory Factor Analysis to help select the MPI-LA indicators. The meaning of dimensions in multidimensional poverty measurement If multidimensional poverty is not a single concept but many different unrelated concepts, then by definition, it would be impossible to calculate a multidimensional poverty rate or score. [Extracted from the article]

We recently proposed a Multidimensional Poverty Index for the Latin America (MPI-LA) region implementing a broadly used methodology developed by Sabina Alkire and James Foster. The present note is a response to Hector Najera and David Gordon's paper (published in this volume), in which they claim that the MPI-AL is an 'unreliable measure of poverty' because it does not pass some statistical tests that they consider applicable to multidimensional poverty measurement. In this note we address each of their critiques in turn and explain why Najera and Gordon's claim is not correct. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The empirical properties of a multidimensional poverty index require robust assessment. However, poverty research is yet to systematically implement measurement theories and practices that have been proven to be successful in other fields. Measurement theory has been developed over more than 100 years to produce indexes that are scientific (falsifiable) in that researchers put under scrutiny whether their value judgements and assumptions result in scales that have high internal consistency (reliability) and capture the phenomenon they aim to measure (validity). The paper uses the Multidimensional Poverty Index for Latin America (MPI-LA) to illustrate the importance of adopting sound measurement practices. The MPI-LA aims to be an improvement over the widely applied Unsatisfied Basic Needs (UBN) approach. However, its empirical development was based on ad hoc non-standard methods and principles, making the conclusions of the developer's analyses unfalsifiable and prone to confirmation bias. This analysis includes six countries and two time periods. The findings suggest that the MPI-LA is an unreliable measure of poverty and that the pre-specified dimensional structure is invalid. The paper illustrates how standard principles like reliability and validity can be used to inform the discussion about the statistical properties of a given poverty index. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As the multilateral debt relief initiatives draw to a close, this article reviews the impacts of debt relief to low-income countries (LICs) building on both the theoretical and empirical literature of past decades. We show that, while the pioneering studies of the early 2000s are inconclusive, the most recent analyses overcome certain methodological impediments to highlight significant multilateral debt relief initiative effects. These analyses hence suggest that these large-scale programmes may well have met expectations, at least in part. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Absent actual panel household survey data, we construct for the first time synthetic panel data for more than 20 countries accounting for two-thirds of the population in sub-Saharan Africa. We employ in this process repeated cross sections that span, on average, a six-year period for each country. Our analysis suggests that all these countries as a whole have had pro-poor growth. In particular, one third of the poor population escaped poverty during the studied period, which is larger than the proportion of the population that fell into poverty in the same period. The region also saw a 28 per cent increase in the size of the middle class. Chronic poverty, however, remains high and a considerable proportion of the population is vulnerable to falling into poverty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using unique, environmentally augmented household panel data reflecting households' annual cash and subsistence income portfolios, we model change over time in the value of four assets – livestock, implements, savings, and jewellery. A seemingly unrelated regression model reveals that although environmental resources on average contribute 16 per cent of the total household income, the contribution to asset accumulation is limited. Hence, environmental income does not constitute a pathway out of poverty in Nepal under the current set of regulations and tenure regimes. Asset accumulation was instead associated (both negatively and positively) with agricultural income (particularly as subsistence income), wage and business income. Most environmental income was obtained as subsistence income indicating that the environmental resources that households have access to present little opportunity for cash generation. Securing access of the poor to environmental resources may increase its role in poverty alleviation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We use the Bosnian Living Standards Measurement Study (LSMS) survey to show that conflict-induced displacement of agricultural households dramatically affects the adoption of new technologies in agriculture. We exploit the heterogeneity in the level of violence in the pre-war location to account for selection bias. This natural experiment seems to be a source of exogenous variation in our case because violence aims at ethnic cleansing, without economic consideration. We find that the displaced are less likely than stayers to adopt fertiliser and pesticide. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the impact of parental income on child labour. The empirical literature has found conflicting results regarding whether poverty leads parents to send their children to work. Most of this literature, however, treats child labourers as a single homogeneous group, ignoring differences among working children in work intensity, hazard exposure, and type of employer. This paper argues that accounting for the heterogeneity in child's working conditions may explain the conflicting results in the literature. Specifically, the existence of this heterogeneity may reflect heterogeneity in parents' perceptions about the returns to child's work, and hence in parental reasons to send their children to work. To test this hypothesis, I estimate the effects of parental income on child labour for various working conditions, using data from the 2010 Egypt National Child Labour Survey. This dataset provides rich information on the working conditions of child labourers. The findings show that the effect of parental income on child labour is minimal among children who work in non-hazardous jobs, jobs that are not highly physical, or in family businesses. In contrast, higher parental income does decrease the likelihood of child labour in market work, jobs that are physical and hazardous jobs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper quantitatively assesses the effect of value chain development projects on market linkages of small-scale farmers of a staple crop and agricultural income. We focus on Nicaraguan bean producers participating in a value chain development project. Using a panel data set, we apply difference-in-differences and instrumental variables estimators to identify causal effects of programme participation. We first quantify the positive direct effect of training on bean sales in terms of quantity and percentage of beans sold in linked markets. Second, we show that intensified commercialisation contributes to total agricultural income, suggesting a positive indirect effect of the intervention. Our results indicate that market linkage of smallholder farmers requires different sets of intervention tools than farm technical assistance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Poor rural households in developing countries often endure many-faceted burdens including monetary poverty, nutrition deficiency and energy shortage due to reliance on limited local natural resources with low utilisation efficiency. We investigate a sustained pathway in rural China to escape the vicious circle between three important dimensions of poverty - deficiency of income, malnutrition and a low energy consumption profile in terms of reliance on firewood. By exploiting household panel data and a dynamic and recursive multi-equation mixed mode, we identify inter-locking deprivations in income, nutrition and energy consumption. Firewood plantations only offer short-term solutions to break them through income effects, while the sustained pathways in the long-term are increasing agricultural labour productivity and provision of agricultural loans. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Having a bank account is widely regarded as the first step toward financial inclusion of the poor. Funds deposited in a bank account are also observed to lead to higher savings. Exploiting special features of the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS) of India, our estimates indicate that households that receive NREGS wages through a bank do not appear to spend more on education than other comparable households that receive cash payment. The district level intention to treat specification produces similar results. The findings suggest that the rural poor face constraints in accessing their bank accounts due to financial illiteracy and other problems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We examine the welfare impacts of poor women getting low-skilled jobs and find large positive income, consumption and poverty effects at household and individual levels. However, the women workers, their husbands and oldest daughters reduced their leisure, but the women to a much larger extent. Investigating the transmission mechanisms suggests that the impacts did not only go through income effects, but also through a bargaining effect. Getting the job improved the bargaining power of the wife through several mechanisms, which in turn added substantially to the positive impact on household consumption. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Tanzania's recent growth boom has been accompanied by a threefold increase in the share of the rural labour force working in nonfarm employment. Although households with nonfarm enterprises are less likely to be poor, a substantial fraction of these households fall below the poverty line. Heterogeneity in the labour productivity of rural nonfarm businesses calls for a two-pronged strategy for rural transformation. Relatively unproductive enterprises may be part of a poverty reduction strategy but should not be expected to contribute to employment and labour productivity growth. Failure to account for this heterogeneity is likely to lead to disappointing outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses the micro-level welfare impacts of agricultural productivity using a two-wave nationally representative, panel data from rural Malawi. Welfare is measured by various dimensions of poverty and food insecurity; and agricultural productivity is measured by maize yield and value of crop output per hectare. The poverty measures included per capita consumption expenditure, relative deprivation in terms of per capita consumption expenditure, poverty gap and severity of poverty; and the measures of food insecurity included caloric intake and relative deprivation in terms of caloric intake. Depending on the measure of welfare, the impact of agricultural productivity was estimated with a household fixed effects estimator, a two-part estimator or a correlated-random effect ordered probit estimator. The results indicate that growth in agricultural productivity has the expected welfare-improving effect. In terms of economic magnitude, however, both the direct effect and economy-wide spillover effect (in the non-farm sector) of a percentage increase in agricultural productivity on the poverty and food security measures are small. Efforts to effectively improve the welfare of rural agricultural households should therefore go beyond merely increasing agricultural (land) productivity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines whether, in an effort to cope with adverse shocks, poor people with limited coping capacity take large risks (risky coping). About two years after a tropical cyclone in Fiji, many people decided to apply for dangerous international jobs involving casualty risk through a recruitment agency that later turned out to be a fraudster. The analysis reveals that victims with damaged housing are more likely to undertake this risky investment strategy than non-victims. I show evidence that disaster victims use this strategy for risk coping, but not because they have become less risk averse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Poverty estimates based on enumeration from a single point in time form the basis for most country-level analysis of poverty. Cross-country comparisons of poverty, and global counts of the poor, implicitly assume that country-level poverty headcounts are comparable. This paper illustrates that the assumption of comparability is potentially invalid when households are interviewed multiple times throughout the year, as opposed to a single-visit interview. An example from Jordan illustrates how the internationally comparable approach of handling data from repeat visits yields a poverty rate that is 26 per cent greater than the rate that is currently reported as the official estimate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The use of a marginal approach can significantly distort the predicted effects of large price variations on monetary welfare over the medium- to longer-term. This paper aims at shedding some light on the differences between a marginal approach and a non-separable agricultural household model with behavioural responses. When behavioural adjustments are allowed, households can adapt their consumption and production patterns by resulting in lower deteriorations in household welfare. The second-order effects introduced in the approach with responses reduce the negative effects due to the first-order consumption effects, with significant differences across quintiles. On average, the second-order effects represent up to roughly 40 per cent of total first-order effects. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Whereas most studies find the poor in Africa to be more vulnerable to bribery because of their lower socio-economic status, this paper proposes institutional differences as an alternative explanation. Because poor people are unable to afford privately provided services, they must use public services. In relying on the state more often, the poor become more vulnerable to bribery. Analyses of Afrobarometer data show that the poor are not more likely to pay bribes for state monopolised services. The poor’s disproportionate vulnerability to bribery for choice services is a function of their greater likelihood to have contact with the state. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Development discourse has focused on gendered dimensions of poverty, demonstrating how parastatal poverty alleviation programmes target women as aid recipients while devaluing their productive and reproductive work. However, seldom analysed is how privatisation of social services and proliferation of non-governmental organisations (NGOs) have impacted women. We explore this in a Guatemalan community where we find that although NGOs discursively commit to ‘alternative’ development approaches, on the ground they reproduce elements of a neoliberal subjectivity akin to parastatal programmes. NGOs additionally configure aid disbursement as gift giving, requiring beneficiaries to assume affective postures of gratitude, and facilitating intrusion into women’s lives. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Using the panel data for the Philippines in 2003–2009, we estimate a three-level random coefficient model to measure household vulnerability and to decompose it into idiosyncratic and covariate components. We correct heterogeneity bias using Bell and Jones’s ‘within-between’ formulation. A majority of the poor and 18 per cent of the non-poor are found to be vulnerable to unobservable shocks, while both groups of households are more susceptible to idiosyncratic shocks than to covariate shocks. Adequate safety nets should be provided for vulnerable households that lack access to infrastructure, or are larger in size with more dependents and less-educated heads. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The Asian story of miraculous growth and poverty reduction has reinforced mainstream views of development that equate high and sustained economic growth with progress in human wellbeing. But understanding development only in terms of economic growth is not sufficient. This paper offers a different perspective on possible effects of Laos’s transition from a subsistence-oriented economy to a market-oriented economy. We used a multidimensional poverty approach with panel data for the years between 2003 and 2013. Findings suggest that benefits were not equally distributed: 50 per cent of people moved in and out of poverty, and the other half was either non-poor (37%) or always poor (13%). [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Using propensity score matching, this study examines the effects of migration on various indicators of household wellbeing in Cambodia. The results indicate that migration would reduce poverty headcount rate by 3–7 percentage points and decrease the depth of poverty. Migration is also found to reduce by 5–10 per cent the hours worked by members left-behind. The impact of migration on labour participation may be, however, vulnerable to unobservable factors. Nevertheless, the study suggests that important heterogeneous effects which differ from the average impact exist. The analysis is conducted separately by internal and international migration. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Recent research indicates that the political impact of aid, including its impact on accountability institutions, is contingent on its objective. This article explains how this occurs. It relies on evidence from two aid programmes in Uganda, one targeted at poverty reduction and one at democratic governance. I argue that the stated objective of aid programmes masks a deeper cause; individual aid managers’ views of what development entails and how it should be pursued. The evidence suggests that the ‘almost revolution’ in which development has purportedly confronted politics is far more partial, contested, and uneven than many admit. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper examines poverty dynamics and their socioeconomic determinants between 1996 and 2011 in Nepal. With chronic and structural poverty headcount ratios of around 17 per cent, poverty is mostly transient and stochastic affecting up to four-fifths of the population. Descriptively, indigenous Janajatis and lower caste Hindus exhibit the highest rates of chronic and structural poverty. Panel data models suggest significant roles of human capital and household assets in determining poverty, however, with the evidence of caste/ethnic penalty limited mostly to Janajatis. Findings provide important insights into the structure and determinants of poverty dynamics, helping to rethink policies to address them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper identifies the negative consequences of the strongest tropical storm ever to strike Guatemala on household welfare. Per capita consumption fell in urban areas, raising poverty substantially. Households cut back on food consumption and basic durables, and attempted to cope by increasing their adult and child labour supply. The mechanisms at play include the intensity of the shock, food prices and the timing of Agatha with respect to local harvest cycles. The results are robust to placebo treatments, migration and measurement error, and partly explain the increase in poverty in the country previously attributed solely to the collateral effects of the global financial crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this study we use household panel data collected in Marsabit district of Northern Kenya, to analyse the patterns of livelihood sources and poverty among pastoralists in that area. We estimate income poverty using imputed household income relative to the adjusted poverty line and asset poverty using a regression-based asset index and tropical livestock units (TLU) per capita. Our results indicate that keeping livestock is still the pastoralists’ main source of livelihood, although there is a notable trend of increasing livelihood diversification, especially among livestock-poor households. The majority of households (over 70%) are both income and livestock-poor with few having escaped poverty within the five-year study period. Disaggregating income and asset poverty also reveals an increasing trend of both structurally poor and stochastically nonpoor households. The findings show that the TLU-based asset poverty is a more appropriate measure of asset poverty in a pastoral setting. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Drawing on four years of fieldwork in Ethiopia and Uganda, this paper addresses gaps in knowledge about the mechanisms linking agricultural exports with poverty reduction, the functioning of rural labour markets, and the relevance to the lives of the poorest people of Fairtrade. Statistical analysis of survey evidence, complemented by qualitative research, highlights the relatively poor payment and non-pay working conditions of those employed in research sites dominated by Fairtrade producer organisations. We conclude that Fairtrade is not an effective way to improve the welfare of the poorest rural people. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

As a market tool, microcredit is expected to promote individual freedom, for women in particular. By drawing on a southern Indian case, this paper argues that microcredit is in fact shaped by the power structures it is supposed to eradicate. Even if they are partly reshaped, local structures of power remain unavoidable to protect populations (something that microcredit fails to do) but also to build the microcredit market and ensure its legitimacy, for donors, local political arenas and local populations. Far beyond microcredit, our findings question the uneasy relationships between markets and individual freedoms. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Argentina has benefited greatly from the increase in prices of agricultural commodities. With a large share of its population with low and medium-low incomes; however, a sizable part of households is likely to be adversely affected by the accompanying rise in the price of the consumption basket. An ex-ante analysis suggests that this is the case. Changes through a less obvious channel (that is, in factor incomes) are likely to be more beneficial to middle-income households. In general, all households experience losses, with poorer households being the most affected. When accounting for transfers financed through the collection of export taxes, poorer households benefit. In the absence of compensatory measures, increases in the prices of agricultural commodities could potentially have an important impact in terms of indigence and poverty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]