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From the Editor's desk (October 2011)
Tony Addison As autumn moves into winter in Helsinki, it is time to bring you the October edition of UNU-WIDER’s newsletter, WIDER Angle. Regular...
75 UNU-WIDER articles, publications, projects, experts...
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Measuring Poverty Over TimeLuc Christiaensen and Lorraine Telfer-Taivainen If a person suddenly becomes poor, for example, due to an unexpected death or illness in the family...
Working Paper
Keep it realThis 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
Inequality of Opportunity During the Great Recession in UgandaThe 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 ExpenditureThis 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
Savings By and For the PoorThe 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
Impoverishment, Food Consumption and Health in Central and Eastern Europe during the Transition
Working Paper
Economic Shocks, Impoverishment and Poverty-Related Mortality during the Eastern European TransitionThis 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
Conflicting Measures of Poverty and Inadequate Saving by the PoorIn the presence of inequality a status-driven utility function reconciles the conflict between income-based and nutrition-based measures of poverty. Moreover, it can explain why the poor tend to save less, an established empirical fact in the...
Working Paper
On the ‘Inclusiveness’ of India’s Consumption Expenditure GrowthThis 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...
Working Paper
The (Declining) Role of Households in Sustaining China's EconomyCurrent explanations for private consumption’s diminished role in China focus on the expansion of exports and investments. Using structural path analysis, we find additional contributing factors. First, growth patterns during 1997-2007 favoured...
Working Paper
The role of public health insurance in protecting against the costs of ill healthIn the absence of health insurance, households have to self-insure against the risk of ill health, which may involve the use of mechanisms that have long-term consequences. This study analyses whether Mexican households are able to smooth consumption...
Journal Article
Savings by and for the PoorPart of Journal Special Issue Poverty, Development, and Behavioral Economics
Working Paper
Sovereign Debt and Uncertainty in the Mozambican EconomyThis paper studies the impact of uncertainty and debt crisis on the dynamics of the Mozambican economy over the last two decades. Investment boom and accelerated growth did not take place until peace and economic reforms were assured, helped by the...
Book Chapter
Environmental Taxation and Revenue for DevelopmentPart of Book New Sources of Development Finance
Book Chapter
Rural and Urban Income Inequality and PovertyPart of Book Inequality, Growth and Poverty in an Era of Liberalization and Globalization
Working Paper
Income and price elasticities of demand in South AfricaThis 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 ConsumptionThis 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...
Book Chapter
Finance and Poverty in EthiopiaPart of Book Financial Development, Institutions, Growth and Poverty Reduction
Book Chapter
Food Security in Vietnam during the 1990s: The Empirical EvidencePart of Book Food Security
Working Paper
The gendered effects of climate shocks on labour and welfare in ZambiaThis paper exploits several waves of two major nationwide representative surveys to document the impacts of climate shocks on individuals and households in Zambia. We merge these datasets with historical precipitation and temperature data at the...
Working Paper
Weathering challengesMozambique is highly vulnerable to climate change. It faces frequent cyclones, floods, and droughts while having limited revenue collection capacity and social protection programmes. This paper assesses the distributional effects of climate shocks on...
Book
Hierarchy of Needs and the Measurement of Poverty and Standards of LivingThe focus of this study is the idea that choice is hierarchical so that there exists an order of acquisition of durable goods and assets as real incomes increase. Two main approaches to deriving such an order are presented, the so-called Paroush...
Working Paper
Conspicuous consumption for social parityThe 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 MozambiqueAfter 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...
Journal Article
Income and consumption inequality in ChinaPart of Journal Special Issue Income inequalities and redistribution in China
Working Paper
A review of consumption poverty estimation for MozambiqueWe broadly review the challenges encountered and choices made in the national assessments of consumption poverty using the 1996/97, 2002/03, and 2008/09 budget surveys. Efforts to maintain consistency with the previous survey imply that prior choices...
Journal Article
The evolution of inequality in Mozambique 1996/97–2019/20After decades of war, Mozambique experienced sustained economic growth and poverty reduction from the mid-1990s. However, these positive dynamics started to revert from 2015. Meanwhile, inequality stagnated in the period 1996/97–2008/09, before...
Working Paper
Entrepreneurship and WelfareWe examine returns to entrepreneurship using a standard measure of welfare, the per capita consumption expenditure. Using quantile regressions, we find welfare hierarchy in occupations. The results suggest that, across the welfare distribution...
Working Paper
Transfers and DevelopmentContrary to the popular notion that money that is easily earned, is also easily spent, economic theory holds that income is fungible. Drawing on the concept of mental accounting, this study theoretically explores when such a link between spending...
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
The Reliability of Small Area Estimation Prediction Methods to Track PovertyTracking 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
Food Security in Vietnam during the 1990sAnalysing 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 EthiopiaIn 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 ContextHousing 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 ChinaWe 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 DevelopmentThe 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
Looking for Answers to the Food Security ProblemFood 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 IndiaThis 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 DevelopmentThis 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 PovertyMany 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...
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