Book Chapter
Assessing Progress in Welfare Improvements in ZambiaPart of Book Growth and Poverty in Sub-Saharan Africa
Part of Book Growth and Poverty in Sub-Saharan Africa
Part of Book Growth and Poverty in Sub-Saharan Africa
Part of Book Growth and Poverty in Sub-Saharan Africa
Tony Addison With this issue, Angle returns refreshed from its Nordic summer break. The sun continues to shine on the Baltic, although it is getting...
Tony Addison With the end of the year fast approaching, we bring you the last Angle of 2011. Here in Helsinki, the shortest day of the year is nearly...
Luc Christiaensen and Lorraine Telfer-Taivainen If a person suddenly becomes poor, for example, due to an unexpected death or illness in the family...
Nigeria has recorded impressive growth in the last decade, yet the impact of this growth on poverty reduction remains unclear. This paper appraises spatial and temporal non-monetary multidimensional poverty in Nigeria using the first-order dominance...
In simple language and with numerous concrete examples, this policy brief analyses the impact - among others - of key ex-ante factors such as acute 'horizontal inequality' between social groups in the distribution of assets, state jobs, social...
The objective of this research and policy brief is to analyse different mechanisms of access to land for the rural poor in an era when redistribution through expropriative land reform is largely inconsistent with the forces of the political economy...
In this paper, we convey the concept of first-order dominance (FOD) with particular focus on applications to multidimensional population welfare comparisons. We give an account of the fundamental equivalent definitions of FOD, illustrated with simple...
This study appraises non-monetary multidimensional poverty in Nigeria using the novel first order dominance approach developed by Arndt et al. (2012). It examines five dimensions of deprivation: education, water, sanitation, shelter, and energy-using...
This study focuses on growth, poverty and inequality in Rwanda. We take a broad perspective, in two respects. First, we consider a long time period so as to compare the current situation with the pre-war situation, allowing us to assess whether the...
In this paper we make welfare comparisons among districts of Zambia using multidimensional well-being indicators observed at the household level using the first order dominance approach developed by Arndt et al. in 2012. This approach allows welfare...
We use Arndt and Simler’s (2010) utility-consistent approach to calculating poverty lines to analyse poverty in Madagascar in 2001, 2005 and 2010. Because two major political crises occurred between the survey periods, the snapshots of national...
We use Arndt and Simler’s utility-consistent approach to calculating poverty lines to analyse poverty in Ethiopia in 2000, 2005, and 2011. Poverty reduction was steady but uneven, with gains greatest in urban areas in the first half of the decade...
The objective of this paper is to analyse the welfare effects of food price volatility on Cameroonian consumers. Using data from the third Cameroonian Household Consumption Surveys, the price elasticities are obtained from a Quadratic Almost Ideal...
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...
Climate variability poses a major risk to agricultural incomes in Africa. In Ghana, most of the country’s poor people live in the north and households find it difficult to hold back their productive assets during the lean season. This study...
After years of economic decline, conflict, and instability, the Democratic Republic of Congo achieved rapid economic growth in the 2000s along with a reduction in rural consumption poverty. This paper evaluates the extent to which recent growth has...
Understanding the relationship between food insecurity and subjective evaluation of well-being is critical in designing social welfare policies, especially in developing countries. Surprisingly, literature on the topic is scarce. This study adopted...
South Africa has exhibited tepid economic growth over the past twenty years as well as high levels of income inequality characteristic of a middle income country growth trap. This paper compares and contrasts South Africa’s growth trap relative to...
The purpose of this paper is to analyse the growth performance of the Cameroonian economy from independence in 1960 to date, and then to use this as a background for the analysis of poverty, inequality, and non-monetary outcomes. The analysis of...
This paper aims at measuring and analysing for the first time inequality in the distribution of expenditures among households in Togo according to the characteristics of household heads. The study is based on the most recent survey (QUIBB 2006) and...
Official poverty figures in Uganda are flawed by the fact that the underlying poverty lines are based on a single national food basket that was constructed in the early 1990s. In this paper, we estimate a new set of poverty lines that accounts for...
As in much of sub-Saharan Africa, Tanzania has attained rapid economic growth accompanied by only marginal reductions in poverty. Is this mismatch between high economic growth and less significant poverty reduction due to how growth and poverty are...
This paper, using a new set of social development indices, explores the measurement of social development across Africa, and how this relates to broader development patterns and measurement. Development practitioners worldwide increasingly recognize...
This Policy Brief is an outcome of the UNU-WIDER research project 'Social Development Indicators'. The overall aim of the project was to provide insights into how human well-being might be better conceptualized and, in particular, measured, by...
In this paper we argue that the recent evidence on individuals’ decision making is of high relevance for the measurement of poverty when switching from a static and certain to a dynamic and uncertain framework. The numerous proposed measures of multi...
A one-good, representative consumer model of the pre-reform consumer sector of transition economies is developed. An equation is derived that permits empirical estimation of the welfare effect of price liberalization. Empirical estimates are...
The recent history of Zaire presents a unique opportunity to understand and explain humanitarian emergencies. This monograph follows an inductive approach in analysing the trajectory of state-building in Zaire as a significant explanatory variable of...
The transition from plan to market has fundamentally transformed the social structure in Central and Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union. The small Central Asian Republic of Kyrgyzstan exemplifies these changes.Using data from nationally...
Already in the 1950s it became clear that, in spite of its widespread use, the per capita gross national product is an insufficient measure of the well-being of citizens. Thus, in 1954, an expert group within the United Nations suggested that one...
Several studies have indicated an increase in men's mortality in East Germany between 1989 and 1991 in the wake of the reunification of 1990. For some age-groups, death rates soared by up to thirty per cent. This study investigates the evolution and...
The human development index (HDI) developed by the United Nations Development Programme is computed as the average of three equally weighted outcome measures: life expectancy (LI), educational attainment (EI) and income (WI). However, this...
This paper attempts to provide a comprehensive analysis of interrelationships among the determinants of the quality of life (QOL). We show that various measures of well-being are highly sensitive to domains of QOL that are considered in the...
This study, relying on an economic-theoretical approach to index numbers, proposes a framework for incorporating environmental indicators to the measurement of human well-being. Furthermore this study also proposes an improvement index which...
Typical welfare and inequality measures are required to be Lorenz consistent which guarantees that inequality decreases and welfare increases as a result of a progressive transfer. We explore the implications for welfare and inequality measurement of...
There has been much debate about how much poor people in developing countries gain from trade openness, as one aspect of ‘globalization’. The paper views the issue through both ‘macro’ and ‘micro’ empirical lenses. The macro lens uses cross-country...
Determining whether well-being has improved is an important multidisciplinary task. It is important therefore to develop a multidimensional measure of well-being that reflects a wide spectrum of human needs. A new approach is presented in this paper...
A plethora of what are loosely described as social and political indicators of well-being exist. Both the range and country coverage of these indicators has increased appreciably in recent years. In this paper we ask what contribution these...
Identifying the poorest for selection into social transfer programmes is a major challenge facing programme implementers. An innovative cash transfer programme in northern Kenya trialed three targeting mechanisms to learn lessons about which approach...
The celebration of the 30th Anniversary of UNU-WIDER presented the ideal opportunity to look back, take stock, and plan ahead. Where else can a group...
Structural transformation in rural Vietnam has led to rising incomes and a diversification of livelihoods away from agriculture. Using panel data on children in 2,181 rural households surveyed over the 2008-14 period, we examine how the welfare of...
Social insurance has not succeeded in reducing fiscal deficits and expanding coverage to more beneficiaries in Latin America Social assistance has had a greater impact on poverty and inequality than social insurance In lower-middle-income countries...
Part of Book Access to Land, Rural Poverty, and Public Action
This paper studies some empirical implications of models with limited risk sharing due to the imperfect enforceability of contracts. We test whether the amount by which public transfers reduce private transfers is affected by features of the economy...
Poor rural and urban households in developing countries face substantial risks, which they handle with risk-management and risk-coping strategies, including self-insurance through savings and informal insurance mechanisms. Despite these mechanisms...
Part of Journal Special Issue A Collection of UNU-WIDER articles in Chinese
Part of Book Utility Privatization and Regulation
Part of Book Utility Privatization and Regulation
Part of Book The WTO, Developing Countries and the Doha Development Agenda
Human well-being is a core global issue. Achieving and sustaining higher levels of well-being is challenge for individual citizens, governments and international organisations world-wide. Measures of human well-being levels are an integral part of...
The impact of commercial farms on smallholders in developing countries remains highly controversial. This study draws on four periods of investments in commercial farming in Mozambique to frame an empirical analysis of their contemporary economic...
With the overthrow of the Derg in 1991, some 500,000 ex-soldiers needed to be demobilized and reintegrated back into their communities. Successfully integrating such a large number of ex-soldiers is clearly important to social stability. While...
This paper explores the hypothesis that the phenomenon of child labour is explicable in terms of poverty that compels a household to keep its children out of school and put them to work in the cause of the household’s survival. In exploring the link...
The literature on the economics of happiness in the developed economies finds discrepancies between reported measures of wellbeing and income measures. The ‘Easterlin paradox’, for example, shows that average happiness levels do not increase as...
An AGE model with detailed farm supply and substitution relationships is used to analyze impacts of OECD domestic support reform on developing economy welfare. Stylized simulations indicate reforms best suited for reducing trade distortions with...
The paper tracks recent changes in the components of social protection in Latin America, the reforms to social insurance in the 1990s and the growth of social assistance in the 2000s, and assesses their effects on poverty and inequality and...
Economic measures of income have ignored large areas of human well-being and are poor measures of well-being in the areas to which they attend. Despite increased recognition of those distortions, ‘GNP per capita continues to be regarded as the...
This paper examines the measurement of social welfare, poverty and inequality taking into account features that have been found to be important welfare determinants in behavioural economics. Most notably, we incorporate reference-dependence, loss...
The impact of large commercial farms on neighbouring smallholders in low-income sub-Saharan Africa remains controversial. Bringing evidence to a largely anecdotal debate, we deploy a dataset covering all commercial farms in Mozambique, linking them...
Part of Book The Impact of Globalization on the World's Poor
Part of Book The Impact of Globalization on the World's Poor
Alisa DiCaprio Innovations in social protection systems design have moved forward quickly on the supply-side over the past decade. But the same degree...
Part of Book Inequality, Poverty and Well-being
Part of Book Inequality, Poverty and Well-being
Part of Book Inequality, Poverty and Well-being
Part of Book Understanding Human Well-being
Part of Book Access to Land, Rural Poverty, and Public Action
Part of Book Falling Inequality in Latin America
Part of Book Falling Inequality in Latin America
Part of Journal Special Issue Poverty, Development, and Behavioral Economics
Part of Journal Special Issue Poverty, Development, and Behavioral Economics
Part of Journal Special Issue South-South and North-South Trade Agreements
The privatization of the national public utilities that took place almost a decade ago in Argentina seem to be explained by the persisting deficits of the enterprises, a general dissatisfaction with their performance and the difficulties government...
Tanzania has during the past years made substantial progress in stabilising the economy. One of the major issues has been to cut down on government activities and there has been a remarkable contraction. Although tax reform has been an important...
Relying on a general equilibrium model of Argentina’s economy calibrated for 1993 and internalizing all productivity and scale gains achieved up to 1999, this paper isolates the distributional effects of utilities reform from the impact of other...
This paper analyses the privatization of utilities in Bolivia, detailing the particularities of the capitalization mechanism which was used for this purpose. The analysis suggests that capitalization and regulation, and the liberalization of the...
This study evaluates the impact of the over seventy Social Funds (SFs) which were introduced since the mid-1980s to offset the surge in poverty spurred by adjustment. SFs benefited from greater visibility and financial support by the donor community...
Can African countries learn from the development experiences of other regions? Or are the continent’s development challenges unique? This paper looks at the development experience of the Nordic countries, especially Sweden, from the nineteenth...
This paper analyses the reforms that have taken place in the utilities sectors in Spain, with a focus on the political role in shaping the process of these reforms. We argue that the deregulation process was marked by the historical close...
This paper reviews recent research dealing with the relationships between economic growth, income distribution, and poverty. This generally fails to find any systematic pattern of change in income distribution during recent decades. Neither does it...
Privatization has been one of the primary factors generating changes in the Chilean economy over the last decade. Privatization has faced some opposition due part to its uncertain effect on employment and prices. Despite the importance of the topic...
This paper investigates the correlates of household welfare in urban Ethiopia with an emphasis on the impact of education. We use household panel data collected between 1994 and 1997. Welfare is approximated by household income. Although non-educated...
Almost five years after privatization took place in electricity and telecommunications, and major reforms had been carried out in the administration of water, the results is not clear a priori. In order to elucidate the panorama, this research tries...
This paper focuses on the role of ‘institutions’ in poverty alleviation, where both poverty and institutions are interpreted broadly. The broadening of the poverty notion is important at least from the policy perspective. Even if one were convinced...
Combining data from both, a nationwide standards of living survey (LSMS) and a national population and housing census, this paper generates a disaggregated map of poverty and living conditions in Mozambique. This analytical tool helps to overcome a...