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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...
77 UNU-WIDER articles, publications, projects, experts...
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Blog
The Great African Data Debate
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...
Blog
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
Assessing the Impact of Social Grants on InequalityThe 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 PovertyWe 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
The Fall of the ElephantAt 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
Home-grown and grassroots-based strategies for determining inequality towards policy actionSurvey-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 recent evolution of consumption poverty in RwandaThis 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...
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...
Working Paper
South Africa’s Emerging Black Middle ClassSouth 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...
Journal Article
Ordinal Welfare Comparisons with Multiple Discrete IndicatorsWe 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...
Report
Characteristics of the Vietnamese rural economyFollowing 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...
Working Paper
Did Trade Openness Affect Income Distribution in Latin America? Evidence for the Years 1980–2010This paper offers a medium-term perspective for analysing the trade openness–inequality relationship in Latin America. We present three contributions. The first is that we assemble a database on income distribution indicators systematically estimated...
Working Paper
Social and political capital in rural VietnamThis paper exploits five waves of the Vietnam Access to Resources Household Survey (VARHS) to investigate issues of social and political capital in rural Vietnam. I analyse membership of the Communist Party, ‘mass organizations’ (Farmers’ Union...
Working Paper
Land issues in Vietnam 2006–14This paper uses five waves of the Vietnam Access to Resources Household Survey (VARHS) to analyse land issues in Vietnam from a number of different angles. The VARHS provides panel data at plot as well as household level and I use this rich data set...
Book Chapter
Reducing Poverty and Inequality in IndiaPart of Book Inequality, Growth and Poverty in an Era of Liberalization and Globalization
Journal Article
Earnings Mobility in Times of Growth and DeclinePart of Journal Special Issue Globalization, Poverty, and Inequality in Latin America
Book Chapter
Food Security in Vietnam during the 1990s: The Empirical EvidencePart of Book Food Security
Book Chapter
Measuring Food Security Using Respondents' Perception of Food Consumption AdequacyPart of Book Food Security
Book Chapter
Intra-Household Arrangements and Adult Health SatisfactionPart of Book Health Inequality and Development
Journal Article
Introducing the Mapping Attitudes, Perceptions and Support (MAPS) dataset on the Colombian peace processThis 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
What did they say? Respondent identity, question framing, and the measurement of employmentDrawing from two labour market experiments in rural India, we offer insights on the influence of survey design on the measurement of employment. The first experiment contrasts self-reported estimates of employment with proxy-reported estimates from...
Working Paper
Measuring consumption over the phoneThe paucity of reliable, timely household consumption data in many low- and middle-income countries has made it difficult to assess how global poverty has evolved during the COVID-19 pandemic. Standard poverty measurement requires collecting...
Working Paper
Rebel governance and political participationRebels, militias, and criminal groups all govern civilians. Governing strategies adopted by armed groups during civil war likely influence citizens’ post-conflict political participation, with consequences for democratic politics.We theorize that an...
Working Paper
Changes in the Distribution of Wealth in China 1995-2002This 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
Whose intergenerational mobility?Various scholars have estimated levels of intergenerational mobility in OECD countries. Fewer estimates are available for developing countries, where mobility arguably matters more due to starker differences in living standards. This paper presents...
Working Paper
Housing Privatization and Household Wealth in TransitionAll 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...
Book Chapter
What might explain today’s conflicting narratives on global inequality?Part of Book Inequality in the Developing World
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 EthiopiaThis 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 VietnamFor 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
Earnings Mobility in Times of Growth and DeclineIn recent years, the economy of Argentina has experienced both rapid economic growth and severe economic decline. In this paper, we use a series of one-year long panels to study who gained the most in pesos when the economy grew and who lost the most...
Working Paper
Intra-Household Arrangements and Health SatisfactionThis paper uses a subjective wellbeing approach to study the role of household arrangements on the health satisfaction of an individual. It also studies the impact of household arrangements on health satisfaction across different income groups, by...
Working Paper
Evolution of Land Distribution in West Bengal 1967-2004This paper uses data from a household survey to estimate changes in land distribution in rural West Bengal between 1967-2004 and decompose these into contributions of different factors. There was a substantial drop in land per household and land per...
Working Paper
Effects of Food Price Shocks on Child MalnutritionA propitiously timed household survey carried out in Mozambique over the period 2008-09 permits us to evaluate the short-to-medium run relationship between sudden shocks to food prices and child nutrition status. We link local price inflation with...
Working Paper
Welfare dynamics in India over a quarter-centuryWe 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
Measuring Food Security Using Respondents' Perception of Food Consumption AdequacyFood security is a complex and multi-dimensional phenomenon. As such, its measurement may entail and benefit from the combination of both ‘qualitative-subjective’ and ‘quantitative-objective’ indicators. Yet, the evidence on the external validity of...
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
Income redistribution in Latin AmericaWe 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, 1984-99This 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 BoxIn 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 CountriesBased 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 EvolutionMeasuring 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...
Working Paper
The Dynamics of Inequality Change in a Highly Dualistic EconomyWe examine the drivers of inequality change in Honduras between 1991-2007, trying to understand why inequality increased in Honduras until 2005, while it was falling in most other Latin American countries. Using annual household surveys, we document...
Working Paper
The Changing Pattern of Undernutrition in IndiaThis study analyses the changes in prevalence of undernutrition between the 1980s and 1990s at the national and sub-national levels in India and focuses on the rural-urban comparisons. The study exploits the demographic information available in...
Working Paper
Reducing Poverty and Inequality in IndiaThis 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...
Working Paper
Gender and Ethnicity in Post-Conflict KosovoThe paper examines the comparative economic wellbeing of female- and male-headed households among Serbs and Albanians in post-conflict Kosovo. Evidence from the living standards measurement study (LSMS) household survey, 2001, shows that Serb...
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