Working Paper
Changes in the Distribution of Wealth in China 1995-2002
This paper investigates some major changes in the wealth distribution in China using the data from two national household surveys conducted in 1995 and 2002. The surveys collected rich information on household wealth and its components, enabling a...
Working Paper
Housing Privatization and Household Wealth in Transition
All countries in transition experienced increases in inequality. They have also undertaken massive privatization of key asset housing, often on give-away terms. Are these two phenomena related? Has transfer of ownership rights to residents slowed...
Blog
Measuring Poverty Over Time
by
Luc Christiaensen, Lorraine Telfer-Taivainen
August 2012
Luc 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
Welfare dynamics in India over a quarter-century
We analyse the Indian National Sample Survey data spanning the period 1987/88–2011/12 to uncover patterns of transition into and out of different classes of consumption distribution. At the aggregate level, income growth has accelerated, accompanied...
Working Paper
A new inequality estimate for urban India?
This paper applies a novel inequality estimation method to household consumption expenditure in Mumbai, India. Since the richest households may be missing in survey data, this re-estimated inequality figure takes them into account by combining survey...
Working Paper
Income redistribution in Latin America
We analyse the effect of taxes and benefits on income distribution of six Latin American countries: Argentina, Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Uruguay, and Venezuela. Our analysis makes use of tax-benefit microsimulation models based on harmonized...
Working Paper
How Responsive is Poverty to Growth? A Regional Analysis of Poverty, Inequality, and Growth in Indonesia, 1984-99
This paper uses six nationally representative household consumption surveys to develop successive poverty profiles for Indonesia over a fifteen-year period of sustained high growth followed by rapid contraction. Adopting a ‘cost-of-basic-needs’...
Working Paper
Opening the Convergence Black Box
In this paper we address the issues involved with the use of microeconomic data, that is, household surveys, to compare the patterns of income growth among different regions instead of the commonly used aggregate data. In particular, we investigate...
Working Paper
Are Neighbours Equal? Estimating Local Inequality in Three Developing Countries
Based on a statistical procedure that combines household survey data with population census data, this paper presents estimates of inequality for three developing countries at a level of disaggregation far below that allowed by household surveys...
Working Paper
Explaining Poverty Evolution
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...
Journal Article
Introducing the Mapping Attitudes, Perceptions and Support (MAPS) dataset on the Colombian peace process
This article introduces the Mapping Attitudes, Perceptions and Support (MAPS) dataset, which provides rich survey data from more than 12,000 respondents in Colombia. Our panel survey – carried out in two separate waves in 2019 and 2021 – is...
Working Paper
The recent evolution of consumption poverty in Rwanda
This paper analyses the evolution of consumption poverty in Rwanda between 2001/1 and 2010/11, using three comparable good quality household surveys analysed along with detailed price data. Rwanda achieved impressive growth over this period. The...
Working Paper
Assessing the Impact of Social Grants on Inequality
The democratic government in South Africa has developed a system of social grants to combat the high levels of poverty and inequality inherited from the apartheid regime. With the help of modest economic growth and an associated increase in per...
Working Paper
Is inequality underestimated in Mozambique?
Household budget surveys in sub-Saharan Africa are designed to facilitate poverty measurement and may fail to fully capture consumption in wealthy households. As a result, inequality is likely underestimated. We address upper tier consumption...
Journal Article
Explaining the Evolution of Poverty
We provide a comprehensive approach for analyzing the evolution of poverty using Mozambique as a case study. Bringing together data from disparate sources, we develop a novel 'back-casting' framework that links a dynamic computable general...
Working Paper
South Africa’s Emerging Black Middle Class
South Africa has seen a significant increase in the size of the black middle class in the post-apartheid period, but the attitudinal consequences of indicators of the middle class, as of 2011, are inconsistent and modest in size. While members of the...
Working Paper
Home-grown and grassroots-based strategies for determining inequality towards policy action
Survey-based tools for determining inequality in Africa south of the Sahara have been critiqued for being too expensive, and oftentimes unsuitable to the realities of the region. The need for a reliable alternative for determining wealth distribution...
Working Paper
The Fall of the Elephant
At the end of the 1980s, Côte d’Ivoire entered a deep macroeconomic crisis that put an end to the often-praised ‘Ivorian miracle’. After the death of the founding father Houphouet-Boigny, unrestrained political competition added to bad economic...
Working Paper
What might explain today’s conflicting narratives on global inequality?
How unequal is the world today? Is global income inequality falling, as many economists claim, or is it rising, as one often hears? This paper reviews the arguments and evidence. A number of concerns about the underlying data are identified, with...
Working Paper
Dynamics of Poverty in Ethiopia
This paper addresses issues related to the dynamics of income poverty using unique household panel data for urban and rural areas of Ethiopia covering the period 1994-97. The percentage of households that remained in poverty was twice as large in...
Working Paper
Multidimensional poverty in Vietnam
For years, the international development community has been considering poverty as a multidimensional phenomenon, which takes into account not only income or consumption of the poor, but also their access to basic needs (education, health, etc.) and...
Working Paper
Reducing Poverty and Inequality in India
This study examines the empirical relationship among inequality, poverty and economic growth in India. Using data on consumption from the 13th to the 53rd Rounds of the National Sample Survey, the author computes, for both rural and urban sectors...
Blog
From The Editor's Desk (October 2012)
Tony Addison UNU-WIDER is having a very active and successful autumn. Our climate change and development policy conference at the end of September...
Blog
The Great African Data Debate
by
Carl-Gustav Lindén
September 2013
24 September 2013 Carl-Gustav Lindén At the recent UNU-WIDER conference here in Helsinki on inclusive growth in Africa, the quality of national...
Blog
From the Editor's Desk (January 2012)
Tony Addison January saw the snow arrive in Helsinki. As I look out across the harbour, the scene is one of various shades of white and grey. The...
Report
Characteristics of the Vietnamese rural economy
Following the successful implementation of the Doi Moi reform programme, Viet Nam has experienced outstanding economic progress, for example in aggregate output and poverty reduction. For many years, Viet Nam developed much faster than the typical...
Report
Characteristics of the Vietnamese rural economy (in Vietnamese)
Tiếp nối sự thành công của chương trình cải cách Đổi mới, Việt Nam đã gặt hái được rất nhiều thành tựu kinh tế về tăng trưởng và giảm nghèo, Việt nam đã phát triển nhanh hơn các nước đang phát triển khác; và từ năm 2014, sự khác biệt về tăng trưởng...
Report
Characteristics of the Vietnamese rural economy :
Research report prepared under Component 5 of the Business Sector Development Programme (BSPS), Hanoi, Vietnam and the Agricultural Sector Programme Support (ASPS), 2013. With DERG, CIEM and IPSARD research teams.The origin of this report dates back...
Report
Characteristics of the Vietnamese rural economy (In Vietnamese) :
Research report prepared under Component 5 of the Business Sector Development Programme (BSPS), Hanoi, Vietnam and the Agricultural Sector Programme Support (ASPS), 2013. With DERG, CIEM and IPSARD research teams.The origin of this report dates back...
Journal Article
Ordinal Welfare Comparisons with Multiple Discrete Indicators
We develop an approach for making welfare comparisons between populations with multidimensional discrete well-being indicators observed at the micro level. The approach is rooted in the concept of multidimensional first order dominance. It assumes...