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...