urbanization and poverty reduction the role of rural diversification and secondary towns a rather unique panel tracking more than 3 300 individuals from households in rural kagera tanzania during 1991 4 2010 shows that about one in two individuals households who exited poverty did so by transitioning from agriculture into the rural nonfarm economy or secondary towns only one in seven exited poverty by migrating to a large city although those moving to a city experienced on average faster consumption growth further analysis of a much larger cross country panel of 51 developing countries cannot reject that rural diversification and secondary town development lead to more inclusive growth patterns than metropolitization indications are that this follows because more of the poor find their way to the rural nonfarm economy and secondary towns than to distant cities the development discourse would benefit from shifting beyond the rural urban dichotomy and focusing instead more on how best to urbanize and develop the rural nonfarm economy and secondary towns

market efficiency and insider trading new evidence that corporate insiders earn profits from stock trading does not surprise most financial economists but that outsiders can earn abnormal returns by using pub licly available insider trading data constitutes a serious exception to stock market efficiency the authors show that this anomaly conti nues to exist despite the publication of studies attesting to its exi stence they suggest that the anomalous profits to outsiders are a ma nifestation of the size and earnings price ratio effects controlling for these factors reduces outsider profits by half the additional a ssumption of a 2 percent transactions cost makes outsider profits zer o or negative insider profits after an assumed 2 percent transactio ns cost are a moderate 3 percent per annum for annual holding period s copyright 1988 by the university of chicago

the determinants of homeownership affordability among the sandwich class empirical findings from guangzhou china the sandwich class is an east asian term referring to the lower middle class using a large and unique micro dataset collected in guangzhou this paper examines empirically the potential determin

changes over time in multidimensional poverty methodology and results for 34 countries summary this paper sets out a systemic account of intertemporal changes in multidimensional poverty using the alkire foster adjusted headcount ratio and its consistent sub indices it uses three techniques to assess the pro poorness of multidimensional poverty reduction the analysis of changes in multidimensional poverty draws on the global multidimensional poverty index mpi and related destitution measure in 34 countries and 338 sub national regions covering 2 5 billion people for which there is a recent mpi estimation and comparable demographic and health survey dhs dataset across time first it assesses overall changes in poverty and its incidence and intensity and compares this with changes in 1 90 poverty next utilizing the property of subgroup decomposability it examines changes in the mpi and its consistent sub indices over time across urban rural regions sub national regions and ethnic groups the decomposition analysis identifies relevant national patterns including those in which the pace of poverty reduction is higher for the poorest subgroups finally the paper analyzes the dynamics of a strict subset of the poor who are identified as destitute using a more extreme deprivation cutoff vector and studies relative rates of reduction of destitution and poverty by country and region this extensive empirical analysis illustrates how to assess the extent and patterns of reduction of multidimensional poverty as well as whether it is inclusive or whether some people or groups are left behind naturally some further research questions emerge

efficiency analysis for exogenously fixed inputs and outputs we evaluate by means of mathematical programming formulations the relative technical and scale efficiencies of decision making units dmus when some of the inputs or outputs are exogenously fixed and beyond the discretionary control of dmu managers this approach further develops the work on efficiency evaluation and on estimation of efficient production frontiers known as data envelopment analysis dea we also employ the model to provide efficient input and output targets for dmu managers in a way that specifically accounts for the fixed nature of some of the inputs or outputs we illustrate the approach using real data for a network of fast food restaurants

some models for estimating technical and scale inefficiencies in data envelopment analysis in management contexts mathematical programming is usually used to evaluate a collection of possible alternative courses of action en route to selecting one which is best in this capacity mathematical programming serves as a planning aid to management data envelopment analysis reverses this role and employs mathematical programming to obtain ex post facto evaluations of the relative efficiency of management accomplishments however they may have been planned or executed mathematical programming is thereby extended for use as a tool for control and evaluation of past accomplishments as well as a tool to aid in planning future activities the ccr ratio form introduced by charnes cooper and rhodes as part of their data envelopment analysis approach comprehends both technical and scale inefficiencies via the optimal value of the ratio form as obtained directly from the data without requiring a priori specification of weights and or explicit delineation of assumed functional forms of relations between inputs and outputs a separation into technical and scale efficiencies is accomplished by the methods developed in this paper without altering the latter conditions for use of dea directly on observational data technical inefficiencies are identified with failures to achieve best possible output levels and or usage of excessive amounts of inputs methods for identifying and correcting the magnitudes of these inefficiencies as supplied in prior work are illustrated in the present paper a new separate variable is introduced which makes it possible to determine whether operations were conducted in regions of increasing constant or decreasing returns to scale in multiple input and multiple output situations the results are discussed and related not only to classical single output economics but also to more modern versions of economics which are identified with contestable market theories

the renminbi and poor country growth discussions on how best to exit from global imbalances to create a more balanced world economy have ignored the impact on poor countries of proposals to redress these imbalances this paper aims at filling that gap it gauges the degree of renminbi rmb undervaluation presents evidence on rmb undervaluation and china s gdp growth rate surveys the role of the real effective exchange rate both its level and its stability over time for underpinning growth in developing countries especially in large dual economies such as china and india finally the paper presents new evidence on growth linkages between china and poor countries for the last two decades and surveys literature on potential displacement effects of rmb appreciation the analysis allows broad conclusions to be drawn about the potential developing country beneficiaries and losers from various renminbi adjustment scenarios in the forthcoming years

poverty reduction during 1990 2013 did millennium development goals adoption and state capacity matter abstract while poverty reduction remains central in the post 2015 agenda its determinants remain debated in the literature especially the role of structural conditions related to governance this paper provides an assessment of two key dimensions the global adoption of mdgs and state capacity we do so by studying whether they facilitated convergence in income poverty measures using cross section and panel methods with data on 89 developing economies for the period 1990 2013 we find that poverty headcount and gap measures tended to decrease faster in countries with initially higher income poverty such convergence accelerated after 2000 suggesting that mdgs adoption was instrumental to poverty reduction however this still leaves unexplained substantial variation in poverty reduction performance across countries such variation is explained by state capacity countries with greater ability to administer their territories in 1990 experienced faster income poverty reduction and were more likely to have achieved the mdg target this result is insensitive to robust regression methods and to a large set of controls initial level of income dependence on natural resources education and health inputs dependence on foreign aid ethnic fractionalization regional effects and a set of governance variables as good governance and effective institutions are included in the sustainable development goals this result provides empirical justification for this move suggesting that more effective states could be crucial to sustain the development progress achieved so far

china s uneven progress against poverty while the incidence of extreme poverty in china fell dramatically over 1980 2001 progress was uneven over time and across provinces rural areas accounted for the bulk of the gains to the poor though migration to urban areas helped the pattern of growth mattered rural economic growth was far more important to national poverty reduction than urban economic growth agriculture played a far more important role than the secondary or tertiary sources of gross domestic product gdp rising inequality within the rural sector greatly slowed poverty reduction provinces starting with relatively high inequality saw slower progress against poverty due both to lower growth and a lower growth elasticity of poverty reduction taxation of farmers and inflation hurt the poor external trade had little short term impact

measuring global poverty why ppp methods matter abstract we present theory and evidence to suggest that in the context of analyzing global poverty the eks approach to estimating purchasing power parities yields more appropriate international comparison of real incomes than the geary khamis approach our analysis of the 1996 and 2005 international comparison project data confirms that the geary khamis approach substantially overstates the relative incomes of the world s poorest nations and this leads to misleading comparisons of poverty across regions and over time the eks index of real income is much closer to being a true index of economic welfare and is therefore preferred for assessment of global poverty

reinventing foreign aid for inclusive and sustainable development kuznets piketty and the great policy reversal this survey essay reviews over 200 papers in arguing that in order to achieve sustainable and inclusive development foreign aid should not orient developing countries towards industrialisation in the perspective of kuznets but in the view of piketty abandoning the former s view that inequality will fall with progress in industrialisation and placing more emphasis on inequality in foreign aid policy will lead to more sustainable development outcomes inter alia mitigate short term poverty address concerns of burgeoning population growth train recipient governments on inclusive development fight corruption and mismanagement and avoid the shortfalls of celebrated kuznets conjectures we discuss how the essay addresses post 2015 development challenges and provide foreign aid policy instruments with which discussed objectives can be achieved in summary the essay provides useful policy measures to avoid past pitfalls output may be growing and yet the mass of the people may be becoming poorer lewis 1955 lewis led all developing countries to water proverbially speaking some african countries have so far chosen not to drink amavilah 2014 piketty 2014 has led all developing countries to the stream again and a challenging policy syndrome of our time is how foreign aid can help them to drink

microfinance and poverty a macro perspective we test the hypothesis that microfinance reduces poverty at the macro level using cross country and panel data which are constructed by the microfinance information exchange data on microfinance institutions mfis and the world bank data taking account of the endogeneity associated with mfis loans we show that a country with higher mfis gross loan portfolio per capita tends to have lower levels of poverty indices contrary to recent micro evidence our results suggest that microfinance significantly reduces poverty at macro level and thus reinforce the case for channeling funds from development finance institutions and governments of developing countries into mfis

weakly relative poverty prevailing measures of relative poverty are unchanged when all incomes grow or contract by the same proportion this property stems from seemingly implausible assumptions about the disutility of relative deprivation and the cost of social inclusion the authors propose weakly relative lines that relax these assumptions on calibrating our measures to national poverty lines and survey data we find that half the population of the developing world in 2005 lived in poverty only half of whom were absolutely poor the total number of poor rose over 1981 to 2005 despite falling numbers of absolutely poor with sustained economic growth the incidence of relative poverty became less responsive to further growth the number of relatively poor rose just as the numbers of absolutely poor fell

welfare dynamics in rural kenya and madagascar this paper presents comparative qualitative and quantitative evidence from rural kenya and madagascar in an attempt to untangle the causality behind persistent poverty we find striking differences in welfare dynamics depending on whether one uses total income including stochastic terms and inevitable measurement error or the predictable structural component of income based on a household s asset holdings our results suggest the existence of multiple dynamic asset and structural income equilibria consistent with the poverty traps hypothesis furthermore we find supporting evidence of locally increasing returns to assets and of risk management behaviour consistent with poor households defence of a critical asset threshold through asset smoothing

demography growth and global income inequality global income inequality has been declining for several decades we argue that global income inequality will reach its lowest level around 2027 and then will rise again this development is the result of both economic and demographic forces by combining economic projections with demographic developments and by using gdp per worker instead of gdp per capita in projecting income levels we emphasize the role of demographics in income inequality especially in the long run after 2030 differences in population growth and population structure between countries in different stages of development are shown to increase global income inequality

complex economic dynamics obvious in history generic in theory elusive in data summary the capacity of nonlinear dynamic models to mimic qualitative features of economic data is illustrated with an adaptive version of the neoclassical growth theory implications for econometric methodology are discussed emphasizing structural estimation and qualitative inference

poverty and household size the widely held view that larger families tend to be poorer in developing countries has influenced research and policy the scope for size economies in consumption cautions against this view we find that the correlation between poverty and size vanishes in pakistan when the size elasticity of the cost of living is about 0 6 this turns out to be the elasticity implied by a modified version of the food share method of setting scales by contrast some measures of child nutritional status indicate an elasticity of unity consideration of the weight attached to child versus adult welfare may help resolve the non robustness of demographic profiles of poverty excerpt

social class and the spirit of capitalism one of the key social transformations that accompanied the british industrial revolution was the economic decline of the aristocracy standard theories of wealth inequality cannot explain why the aristocrats in spite of their superior wealth and education failed to be the main protagonists and beneficiaries of industrialization we discuss recent research based on a model of endogenous preferences that is consistent with the demise of aristocracy jel 010 040

mimickers of corporate insiders who make large volume trades most prior research shows that corporate insiders can systematically earn abnormal returns by buying or selling their own securities also several studies have investigated whether outsiders can earn abnormal returns by mimicking the trades of insiders after the latter report their trades the findings of these studies suggest that they cannot in contrast this study s results indicate that outsiders can earn significant abnormal returns by mimicking such trades this conclusion is consistent with a growing body of empirical literature that suggests that the market is not efficient in the semistrong form i e is not efficient with respect to all publicly available information

measuring poverty in a growing world or measuring growth in a poor world the extent to which growth reduces global poverty has been disputed for 30 years although there are better data than ever before controversies are not resolved a major problem is that consumption measured from household surveys which is used to measure poverty grows less rapidly than consumption measured in national accounts in the world as a whole and in large countries particularly india china and the united states in consequence measured poverty has fallen less rapidly than appears warranted by measured growth in poor countries one plausible cause is that richer households are less likely to participate in surveys but growth in the national accounts is also upward biased and consumption in the national accounts contains large and rapidly growing items that are not consumed by the poor and not included in surveys so it is possible for consumption of the poor to grow less rapidly than national consumption without any increase in measured inequality current statistical procedures in poor

do middle classes bring about institutional reforms abstract we reexamine the association between poverty the middle class and institutional outcomes using a newly developed cross country panel dataset containing detailed information on the distribution of income and expenditure when the size of the middle class increases measured as the proportion of people with income above 10 us dollars a day in purchasing power parity ppp terms social policy on health and education becomes more active and the quality of governance regarding democratic participation and official corruption improves this does not occur at the expense of economic freedom as an expansion of the middle class also implies more market oriented economic policy on trade and finance in these respects the impact of a larger middle class appears to be more robust than those of lower poverty lower inequality or higher gross domestic product gdp per capita

dualism and macroeconomic volatility this paper develops a simple macroeconomic model that shows that combining capital market imperfections together with unequal access to investment opportunities across individuals can generate endogenous and permanent euctuations in aggregate gdp investment and interest rates reducing inequality of access may be a necessary condition for macroeconomic stabilization moreover countercyclical escal policies have a role to play in our model savings are underutilized in slumps because of the limited debt capacity of potential investors therefore the government should issue public debt during recessions in order to absorb those idle savings and enance investment subsidies or tax cuts for investors the most important single fact about saving and investment activities is that in our industrial society they are generally done by different people and for different reasons for years there might tend to be too little investment leading to deeation losses excess capacity and unemployment for other years there might tend to be too much investment leading to periods of chronic ineation unless prudent and proper public policies in the escal and monetary eelds are followed paul a samuelson economics 8th edition 1970 pp 196 198

new ways of looking at old issues inequality and growth abstract the paper uses new cross country data on income and asset land distribution to show that i there is a strong negative relationship between initial inequality in the asset distribution and long term growth ii inequality reduces income growth for the poor but not for the rich and iii available longitudinal data provide little support for the kuznets hypothesis policies that increase aggregate investment and facilitate acquisition of assets by the poor might thus be doubly beneficial for growth and poverty reduction

income distribution and macroeconomics this paper analyzes the role of wealth distribution in macroeconomics through investment in human capital it is shown that in the presence of credit markets imperfections and indivisibilities in investment in human capital the initial distribution of wealth affects aggregate output and investment both in the short and in the long run as there are multiple steady states this paper therefore provides an additional explanation for the persistent differences in per capita output across countries furthermore the paper shows that cross country differences in macroeconomic adjustment to aggregate shocks can be attributed among other factors to differences in wealth and income distribution across countries

no condition is permanent middle class in nigeria in the last decade the economic debate on existence and definition of the middle class has become particularly lively in many developing countries despite this growing interest the identification of the middle class group in these countries remains quite challenging building on a recently developed framework to define the middle class this paper tries to estimate the nigerian middle class size in a rigorous quantitative manner by exploiting publicly available panel data the expenditure associated to a 10 percent probability of falling into poverty is estimated and this is used as the middle class threshold for nigeria the threshold expenditure for the middle class in nigeria is found to be 378 39 naira per capita per day 2010 ppp relying on this threshold and through survey to survey imputation the size of nigeria s middle class in 2003 is also estimated the results show that there has been considerable improvement on the size of the middle class and poverty reduction between 2003 and 2013 poverty decreased between 2003 and 2013 from 45 to 33 percent while the middle class increased from 13 percent to 19 percent nevertheless the results still paint a heterogeneous picture of poverty and the middle class in nigeria where the largest portion of the population although above the poverty threshold continues to live with average or high vulnerability to poverty

impact of financial crises on poverty in developing world an empirical approach in this paper we adopt a cross country perspective to analyze the short term effects of currency banking and debt crises on poverty we employ multivariate fixed effects panel data analysis in order to examine whether and to what extent different types of financial crises impact the poverty headcount ratio and the poverty gap as measured by the world bank our findings suggest that out of the three categories of financial crises we identify it is currency crises that most significantly exacerbate both the incidence and depth of poverty in the short run we find evidence that banking crises are associated with an increase in the depth of poverty but not the incidence however this effect tends to be short lived while our analysis shows no direct effect of sovereign debt crises on short term poverty

evaluating the operational efficiency of major ports in the asia pacific region using data envelopment analysis in recent years as competition among international ports has intensified the impartial and objective evaluation of port operational efficiency has become increasingly important in enabling each individual port to understand its peculiar strengths and weaknesses as well as any immediate threats or opportunities that may affect its competitive environment this study applies ccr model bcc model and 3 stage dea model to evaluate the changes in efficiency that have taken place between 1998 and 2001 in 10 ports in the asia pacific region using cross period data the empirical results show that different model will lead to different result on average the efficiency estimated by 3 stage dea procedure is the highest while ccr efficiency is the lowest it should be noted that the efficiencies based on ccr and bcc model are somewhat lower than the 3 stage dea approaches because they do not take the environmental factors managerial inefficiency and statistical noises into account

the developing world is poorer than we thought but no less successful in the fight against poverty a new data set on national poverty lines is combined with new price data and almost 700 household surveys to estimate absolute poverty measures for the developing world we find that 25 of the population lived in poverty in 2005 as judged by what poverty typically means in the world s poorest countries this is higher than past estimates substantial overall progress is still indicated the corresponding poverty rate was 52 in 1981 but progress was very uneven across regions the trends over time and regional profile are robust to various changes in methodology though precise counts are more sensitive

efficiency gains from port reform and the potential for yardstick competition lessons from mexico abstract this paper shows how measures of relative efficiency performance could promote yardstick competition between port infrastructure operators the illustration is based on a study of the efficiency effects of the mexican 1993 port reform it covers 1996 99 and relies on a stochastic production frontier to show that mexico s ports achieved 2 8 3 3 average annual efficiency gains since reform the port specific measures point to consistent leaders and laggards which would not all be identified by common partial productivity indicators this information could be built into an explicit incentive based regulatory regime aiming at promoting catch up by laggards

a new data set measuring income inequality this article presents a new data set on inequality in the distribution of income the authors explain the criteria they applied in selecting data on gini coefficients and on individual quintile groups income shares comparison of the new data set with existing compilations reveals that the data assembled here represent an improvement in quality and a significant expansion in coverage although differences in the definition of the underlying data might still affect inter temporal and international comparability based on this new data set the authors do not find a systematic link between growth and changes in aggregate inequality they do find a strong positive relationship between growth and reduction of poverty

when is growth pro poor evidence from a panel of countries abstract growth is pro poor if the poverty measure of interest falls according to this definition there are three potential sources of pro poor growth a a high growth rate of average incomes b a high sensitivity of poverty to growth in average incomes and c a poverty reducing pattern of growth in relative incomes i empirically decompose changes in poverty in a sample of developing countries during the 1980s and 1990s into these three components in the medium to long run most of the variation in changes in poverty can be attributed to growth in average incomes suggesting that policies and institutions that promote broad based growth should be central to the pro poor growth agenda most of the remainder of the variation in changes in poverty is due to poverty reducing patterns of growth in relative incomes rather than differences in the sensitivity of poverty to growth in average incomes cross country evidence provides relatively little guidance as to the policies and institutions that promote these other sources of pro poor growth

when does economic growth reduce poverty and strengthen the middle class a state level sector specific analysis of peru using novel state level data of peru from 1997 to 2010 we investigate how growth in different sectors affects poverty rates and the middle class our results indicate that only the manufacturing sector seems to robustly decrease poverty growth in the service sector emerges as a meaningful predictor of a rising middle class allowing for regional differences we find substantial variation across the 25 peruvian states with large shifts in magnitudes signs and statistical importance beyond the immediate implications for peru these findings highlight the importance of analyzing the link between economic performance and poverty rates on a subnational level policy implications are likely to differ substantially depending on the source of economic growth and regional particularities

the developing world s bulging but vulnerable middle class summary western notions of the middle class are of little obvious relevance to developing countries instead the middle class is identified here as those living above the median poverty line of developing countries even if still poor by rich country standards over 1990 2005 economic growth and global distributional shifts allowed an extra 1 2 billion people to join the developing world s middle class four fifths came from asia and half from china many of those in this new middle class remain fairly close to poverty only 100 million of the 1 2 billion would not be considered poor in any developing county economic growth typically came with an expanding middle class

growth inequality and poverty looking beyond averages the evidence is compelling that the poor in developing countries do typically share in the gains from rising aggregate affluence and in the losses from aggregate contraction but how much do poor people share in growth do they gain more in some settings than others do some gain while others lose does pro poor growth mean more or less aggregate growth recent theories and evidence suggest some answers but deeper microeconomic empirical work is needed on growth and distributed change only then will we have a firm basis for identifying the specific policies and programs needed to complement and possibly modify growth oriented policies

poverty and economic development evidence for the brazilian states abstract in the present study our primary concern is to examine the effects of poverty on economic development across the brazilian states from 1980 to 2015 many studies assess the effects of economic growth and economic development on poverty incidence but there is almost no one trying to measure the impact of poverty prevalence on economic development the results of this paper indicate that poverty incidence is essential in the economic development of the brazilian states poorer brazilian states have lower income per worker even when controlling for investment in physical capital human capital stock and the effective depreciation of capital the results point to the variables measuring extreme poverty as having more influence on the economic development of the brazilian states in relation to the variables quantifying poverty

inequality as a determinant of malnutrition and unemployment policy this paper explores the policy implications that are obtained once it is recognized that at low nutrition intakes a person s productivity is an increasing function of intake in the context of a fully general equilibrium model it is shown that if aggregate assets in an economy are neither large nor small certain patterns of lorenz improving asset redistributions or nutrition transfers increase aggregate output and reduce the volume of involuntary unemployment and the incidence of undernourishment copyright 1987 by royal economic society

the world distribution of income falling poverty and convergence period we estimate the world distribution of income by integrating individual income distributions for 138 countries between 1970 and 2000 country distributions are constructed by combining national accounts gdp per capita to anchor the mean with survey data to pin down the dispersion poverty rates and head counts are reported for four specific poverty lines rates in 2000 were between one third and one half of what they were in 1970 for all four lines there were between 250 and 500 million fewer poor in 2000 than in 1970 we estimate eight indexes of income inequality implied by our world distribution of income all of them show reductions in global inequality during the 1980s and 1990s

does aggregation hide the harmful effects of inequality on growth abstract aggregation can severely bias conventional tests of whether inequality impedes growth a micro growth model estimated on farm household data for rural china indicates that asset inequality in the area of residence has a harmful external effect on consumption growth the effect is lost in a regional growth regression

economic growth energy intensity and the energy mix abstract this paper explores how changes in energy intensity and the switch to renewables can boost economic growth to do so we implement a dynamic panel data approach on a sample of 134 countries over the period 1960 to 2010 we incorporate a set of control variables related to human and physical capital socio economic conditions policies and institutions which have been widely used in the literature on economic growth given the current state of technology improving energy intensity is growth enhancing at the worldwide level moreover conditional to energy intensity moving from fossil fuels to frontier renewables wind solar wave or geothermic is also positively correlated with growth our results are robust to the specification of the dynamic panel with respect to alternative approaches pooled ols within group or system gmm and to alternative specifications accounting for heterogeneity across countries a set of institutional factors and other technical aspects

entrepreneurship as a solution to poverty individuals living in poverty remain a critical issue this special issue focuses on how entrepreneurship can help to solve such poverty rather than viewing those in poverty as a market for goods the solution lies in understanding how to help those living in poverty create their own businesses ultimately entrepreneurship among those in poverty will create a long lasting solution to their poverty herein we initially examine the extant knowledge about entrepreneurship we then examine where future research on this important topic should move finally we introduce the five articles that make up this special issue these five articles came from the initial 71 submissions and enhance our knowledge about entrepreneurship as a pathway to reducing poverty

do we see convergence in institutional quality a cross country analysis abstractdifferences in the quality of institutions may explain differences in per capita income yet we know relatively little on how institutions evolve this paper contributes to such knowledge by testing for convergence in legal bureaucratic and administrative institutional quality using cross section and panel methods on a large sample of countries from the 1970s to 2010 we find that countries with initially poor institutions tended to slowly catch up both when they shared the same initial conditions and when they did not however the convergence process seems to be a temporary effect following the end of the cold war

resource rents redistribution and halving global poverty the resource dividend summary this paper considers the proposal that each country distributes its resource rents directly to citizens as a universal and unconditional cash transfer or resource dividend and estimates its potential impact on global poverty for the years 2000 06 using a global dataset on resource rents and the distribution of income i find that if every developing country implemented the policy then the number of people living below 1 a day would be cut by between 27 and 66 depending on the year and the assumptions made looking ahead poverty could be better than halved as long as commodity prices do not drop below their 2004 level

decoding inside information exploiting the fact that insiders trade for a variety of reasons we show that there is predictable identifiable routine insider trading that is not informative about firms futures a portfolio strategy that focuses solely on the remaining opportunistic traders yields value weighted abnormal returns of 82 basis points per month while abnormal returns associated with routine traders are essentially zero the most informed opportunistic traders are local nonexecutive insiders from geographically concentrated poorly governed firms opportunistic traders are significantly more likely to have sec enforcement action taken against them and reduce trading following waves of sec insider trading enforcement

is it enough evidence from a natural experiment in india s agriculture markets access to information and communication technologies icts such as mobile phone networks is widely known to improve market efficiency in this paper we examine whether access to timely and accurate information provided through ict applications has any additional impact using a detailed data set from reuters market light rml a text message service in india that provides daily price information to market participants we find that this information reduces the geographic price dispersion of crops in rural communities by an average of 12 over and above access to mobile phone technology and other means of communication to identify the effect of information on price dispersion we exploit a natural experiment where bulk text messages were banned unexpectedly across india for 12 days in 2010 we find that besides reducing geographic price dispersion rml also increases the rate at which prices converge across india over time we discuss the implications of this for development organizations and informat

the poor get poorer tracking relative poverty in india using a durables based mixture model abstract i propose the use of a durables based mixture model to identify the consumption class structure of a population the mixture model decomposes the marginal distribution of durables ownership across all households into three conditional distributions one each for lower middle and upper classes along with their weights in the population distribution endogenously determining class membership this approach provides a potentially deeper understanding of the dynamics of classes in particular the lower class than can be obtained using poverty lines or pca alone it avoids many well known problems with expenditure data ameliorates the impact of changing survey designs and enables an analysis of the behavior and membership of classes over time i use the mixture approach to show that the urban lower class in india became smaller but poorer during the 1990s

poverty and distributional effects of carbon pricing in low and middle income countries a global comparative analysis abstract even though concerns about adverse distributional implications for the poor are one of the most important political challenges for carbon pricing the existing literature reveals ambiguous results for this reason we assess the expected incidence of moderate carbon price increases for different income groups in 87 mostly low and middle income countries building on a consistent dataset and method we find that for countries with per capita incomes of below usd 15 000 per year at ppp adjusted 2011 usd carbon pricing has on average progressive distributional effects we also develop a novel decomposition technique to show that distributional outcomes are primarily determined by differences among income groups in consumption patterns of energy rather than of food goods or services we argue that an inverse u shape relationship between energy expenditure shares and income explains why carbon pricing tends to be regressive in countries with relatively higher income since these countries are likely to have more financial resources and institutional capacities to deal with distributional issues our findings suggest that mitigating climate change raising domestic revenue and reducing economic inequality are not mutually exclusive even in low and middle income countries

the impact of snap vehicle asset limits on household asset allocation beginning in 2001 states were given the authority to formulate their own rules on how vehicles are counted toward the asset limit in the supplemental nutritional assistance program we exploit differences in timing of the state vehicle asset policy changes to identify their effect on vehicle assets and debts car ownership liquid assets holdings as well as non housing wealth we estimate difference in differences and household fixed effects specifications and find that liberalizing vehicle asset rules increases vehicle assets of households with a high ex ante probability of program participation households also take on more debt to finance their vehicles the increase in car value can be attributed primarily to less educated single parents who already owned a car before the policy change buying more expensive cars

anomalies in security returns and the specification of the market model we examine the hypothesis originally advanced by roll 12 that observed anomalies in excess returns can be explained by misspecification of the market model used to estimate systematic risk we find substantial misspecifications in the model systematically related to size and period of listing of the securities in question there is some evidence that these misspecifications are associated with systemic biases in measured betas used to construct excess returns

what difference do polarisation measures make an application to china in recent years there has been much discussion of the difference between inequality and polarisation the vast literature on inequality is held to miss out key features of distributional change which are better described as changes in polarisation axioms have been proposed which capture some of these differences and measures of polarisation as distinct from inequality have been suggested the theoretical distinctions proposed in this literature are indeed interesting but do the newly proposed measures of polarisation give different results in comparing societies over time we address these questions for china where dramatic increases in inequality and polarisation have been much discussed in the literature we find that contrary to theoretical expectation the new measures of polarisation do not generate very different results from the standard measures of inequality the paper ends by considering a different approach to polarisation which might better conform to the policy concerns expressed in t

what is middle class about the middle classes around the world we expect a lot from the middle classes jim frederick writing in time magazine in 2002 stated china s burgeoning middle class holds the key to the future of the country in a more academic vein easterly 2001 concludes based on a comparison of a large number of countries that countries that have a larger middle class tend to grow faster at least if they are not too ethnically diverse in another article birdsall graham and pettinato 2000 rue the shrinking of the middle class the backbone of both the market economy and of democracy in most advanced societies in the face of burgeoning globalization the economic historian david landes writing about the wealth and poverty of nations 1998 explains england s early ascendancy in terms of the great english middle class of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries of course there is nothing new about this faith in the middle class it follows a long line of theorizing going back at least to max weber 1905 at least three distinct arguments are traditionally made in one new entrepreneurs armed with a capacity and a tolerance for delayed gratification emerge from the middle class and create employment and productivity growth for the rest of society for a formalization of this argument see acemoglu and zilibotti 1997 in a second perhaps more conventional view the middle class is primarily a source of vital inputs for the entrepreneurial class it is their middle class values their emphasis on the accumulation of human capital and savings that makes them central to the process of capitalist accumulation for example doepke and zilibotti 2005 2007 the third view a staple of the business press emphasizes the middle class consumer the consumer who is willing to pay a little extra for quality in this view the middle class demand for quality consumer goods feeds investment in production and marketing which in turn raises income levels for everyone murphy shleifer and vishny 1989 1 this essay asks what we should make of these arguments in the context of today s developing countries starting from data on patterns of consumption and investment by the middle class we look for what is distinct about the global middle class especially when compared to the global poor defined as those whose per capita daily consumption valued at purchasing power parity exchange rates is below 2 a day who were the subject of a previous essay in this journal banerjee and duflo 2007b in particular is there anything special about the way the middle class spend their money earn their incomes or bring up their children

a poverty dynamics approach to social stratification the south african case abstract the wave of upbeat stories on the developing world s emerging middle class has reinvigorated a debate on how social class in general and the middle class in particular ought to be defined and measured in the economics literature most scholars agree that being middle class entails being free from poverty which means being able to afford the basic things in life not only today but also tomorrow in consequence there is an increasing tendency to define the middle class based on a lack of vulnerability to poverty in this paper we strengthen and expand on these existing approaches in three ways first we incorporate the differentiation between the middle class and a non poor vulnerable group into a broader social stratification schema that additionally differentiates between transient and chronic poverty second in estimating the risk of poverty we employ a multivariate regression model that explicitly allows for possible feedback effects from past poverty experiences and accounts for the potential endogeneity of initial conditions unobserved heterogeneity and non random panel attrition four factors insufficiently addressed in existing studies third we highlight the value of paying attention to these conceptual and modelling issues by showing that class divisions based on monetary thresholds inadequately capture a household s chances of upward and downward mobility we then apply our conceptual framework to the south african case we find that only one in four south africans can be considered stably middle class or elite access to stable labor market income is a key determinant of achieving economic stability a lack of jobs as well as the prevalence of precarious forms of work drive high levels of vulnerability which in turn constrains the development of an emergent middle class not only in south africa but potentially also in other parts of the developing world that face similar labor market challenges

inequality and economic growth the empirical relationship reconsidered in the light of comparable data all of the recent empirical work on the relationship between income inequality and economic growth has used inequality data that are not consistently measured this paper argues that this is inappropriate and shows that the significant negative correlation often found between income inequality and growth across countries is not robust when income inequality is measured in a consistent manner using data from the world income inequality database however evidence is found of a significant negative correlation between consistently measured inequality of expenditure data and economic growth for a sample of developing countries

dollar a day revisited the article presents the first major update of the international 1 a day poverty line proposed in world development report 1990 poverty for measuring absolute poverty by the standards of the world s poorest countries in a new and more representative data set of national poverty lines a marked economic gradient emerges only when consumption per person is above about 2 00 a day at 2005 purchasing power parity below this the average poverty line is 1 25 which is proposed as the new international poverty line the article tests the robustness of this line to alternative estimation methods and explains how it differs from the old 1 a day line

poverty reduction during the rural urban transformation the role of the missing middle as countries develop they restructure away from agriculture and urbanize but structural transformation and urbanization patterns differ substantially with some countries fostering migration out of agriculture into rural off farm activities and secondary towns and others undergoing rapid agglomeration in mega cities using cross country panel data for developing countries spanning 1980 2004 the analysis in this paper finds that migration out of agriculture into the missing middle the rural nonfarm economy and secondary towns yields more inclusive growth patterns and faster poverty reduction than agglomeration in mega cities this suggests that patterns of urbanization deserve much more attention when striving for faster poverty reduction

a stochastic frontier model of the productive efficiency of korean container terminals a central objective of port privatization and or deregulation policies is stimulating greater efficiency by engendering a more competitive market and commercial approach to management korea provides a prime example of a nation that is implementing such policies also its ports play a pivotal role in world shipping particularly in the ever burgeoning container market the success of these policies in increasing the productive efficiency of korean container terminals is assessed the uk container terminal sector provides a useful benchmark for comparison since privatization and deregulation have formed an integral part of uk port reforms for nearly 20 years and the effect on efficiency having had time to mature will be much easier to gauge the stochastic frontier model is justified as the chosen methodology for estimating productive efficiency levels and is applied to cross sectional data under a variety of distributional assumptions a panel data model is also estimated results are consistent and su

growth growth accelerations and the poor lessons from indonesia we study the impact of growth and growth accelerations on poverty and inequality in indonesia using a new panel dataset covering 26 provinces over the period 1977 132010 this dataset allows us to distinguish between mining and non mining in indonesia growth in non mining significantly reduces poverty and inequality in contrast overall growth and growth in mining appears to have no effect on the same growth acceleration in non mining reduces poverty and inequality whereas the same in mining increases poverty we expect that the degree of forward and backward linkages of mining and non mining sectors explains the asymmetric result

shocks and their consequences across and within households in rural zimbabwe abstract increasing attention is now being paid to poverty dynamics in developing countries this work links the extent to which households smooth consumption or smooth assets given income shocks the empirical evidence on the churning of households in and out of poverty and the possibility that temporary shocks can have permanent consequences using longitudinal data from rural zimbabwe this paper extends the discussion of these issues by disaggregating the impact of shocks by levels of asset holdings by disaggregating the impact of shocks on individual level welfare and by assessing the extent to which such shocks have permanent consequences by doing so it assesses the validity of distinguishing between asset and consumption smoothing and provides insights into whether poverty dynamics assessed at the household level provide an adequate picture of dynamics at the individual level

revisiting cross country poverty convergence in the developing world with a special focus on sub saharan africa abstract the literature on poverty convergence is sparse and much of the empirical evidence relies on ravallion 2012 who found a lack of poverty convergence across some ninety less developed countries ldcs during 1980 2007 this paper revisits cross country poverty convergence using data from the same sources but an extended period of 1980 2014 we find that while poverty convergence remains absent across ldcs it is present in sub saharan africa ssa during the extended period initial poverty canceling the effectiveness of growth in reducing poverty explains the lack of poverty convergence across ldcs while a strong growth effect dominating the adverse effect of initial poverty on growth effectiveness explains the strong poverty convergence found in ssa a direct adverse link between initial poverty and subsequent growth which ravallion 2012 recognized as the main impediment to poverty convergence during 1980 2007 is not found in this study

corporate bankruptcy and insider trading the authors document significant sales by the insiders of firms filing bankruptcy petitions prior to the filing date they also find that selling is more intense for top executives and officers and that insiders in general systematically sell stock before prices fall and buy stock after prices have fallen although this trading pattern may simply reflect an implicit compensation arrangement between insiders and stockholders the significant sell off does raise potential questions regarding managements incentives to maximize shareholder wealth throughout the chapter 11 process copyright 1997 by university of chicago press

china s soaring vehicle population even greater than forecasted abstract china s vehicle population is widely forecasted to grow 6 11 per year into the foreseeable future barring aggressive policy intervention or a collapse of the chinese economy we suggest that those forecasts are conservative we analyze the historical vehicle growth patterns of seven of the largest vehicle producing countries at comparable times in their motorization history we estimate vehicle growth rates for this analogous group of countries to have 13 17 per year roughly twice the rate forecasted for china by others applying these higher growth rates to china results in the total vehicle fleet reaching considerably higher volumes than forecasted by others implying far higher global oil use and carbon emissions than projected by the international energy agency and others

a theory of trickle down growth and development this paper develops a model of growth and income inequalities in the presence of imperfect capital markets and it analyses the trickle down effect of capital accumulation moral hazard with limited wealth constraints on the part of the borrowers is the source of both capital market imperfections and the emergence of persistent income inequalities three main conclusions are obtained from this model first when the rate of capital accumulation is sufficiently high the economy converges to a unique invariant wealth distribution second even though the trickle down mechanism can lead to a unique steady state distribution under laissez faire there is room for government intervention in particular redistribution of wealth from rich lenders to poor and middle class borrowers improves the production efficiency of the economy both because it brings about greater equality of opportunity and also because it accelerates the trickle down process third the process of capital accumulation initially has the effect of widening inequalities but in later stages it reduces them in other words this model can generate a kuznets curve

distributive politics and economic growth a crude distinction between economics and politics would be that economics is concerned with expanding the pie while politics is about distributing it in this paper we analyze the relationship between the two we focus on how an economy s initial configuration of resources shapes the political struggle for income and wealth distribution and how that in turn affects long run growth our main conclusion is that inequality is conducive to the adoption of growth retarding policies we derive this result from a simple political economy model of growth and present cross country evidence consistent with it the key feature of our model is that individuals differ in their relative factor endowments we distinguish between two types of factors an accumulated factor called capital and a nonaccumulated factor called labor growth is driven by the expansion of the capital stock which is in turn determined by individual saving decisions long run growth is endogenous as the aggregate production function is taken to be linearly homogeneous in capital and productive government services taken together the provision of government services is financed by a tax on capital because government services are productive a small tax on

impact of input substitution and output transformation on data envelopment analysis decisions abstractdata envelopment analysis dea can aid managerial decision making because it offers an opportunity to measure organizational performance in a holistic manner aggregating data from partial indicators into a single comprehensive measure however there are some methodological hazards associated with the use of dea that are especially relevant to managerial decisions but which have been largely ignored in the literature herein we identify and show the impact of a ubiquitous methodological hazard in dea modelling the economic assumptions regarding input substitutions and output transformations

on the measurement of poverty official statistics in the united states and the united kingdom show a rise in poverty between the 1970 s and the 1980 s but scepticism has been expressed with regard to these findings in particular the methods employed in the measurement of poverty have been the subject of criticism this paper re examines three basic issues in measuring poverty the choice of the poverty line the index of poverty and the relation between poverty and inequality one general theme running through the paper is that there is a diversity of judgments which enter the measurement of poverty and that it is necessary to recognize these explicitly in the procedures adopted there is likely to be disagreement about the choice of poverty line affecting both its level and its structure in this situation we may only be able to make comparisons and not to measure differences and the comparisons may lead only to a partial rather than a complete ordering the first section of the paper discusses the stochastic dominance conditions which allow such comparisons illustrating their application by reference to data for the united states the choice of poverty measure has been the subject of an extensive literature and a variety of measures have been proposed in the second section of the paper a different approach is suggested considering a class of measures satisfying certain general properties and seeking conditions under which all members of the class which includes many of those proposed give the same ranking those sceptical about measures of poverty often assert that poverty and inequality are being confounded the third section of the paper distinguishes four different viewpoints and relates them to theories of justice and views of social welfare

inequality is bad for growth of the poor but not for that of the rich the paper assesses the impact of overall inequality as well as inequality among the poor and among the rich on the growth rates along various percentiles of the income distribution the analysis uses micro census data from u s states covering the period from 1960 to 2010 the paper finds evidence that high levels of inequality reduce the income growth of the poor and if anything help the growth of the rich when inequality is deconstructed into bottom and top inequality the analysis finds that it is mostly top inequality that is holding back growth at the bottom

can microfinance reach the poorest evidence from a community managed microfinance intervention summary reaching the poorest is an important objective in many development interventions and microfinance is no exception we review performance indicators for effectiveness of targeting described in the literature and suggest a new metric in order to account for extent and severity of poverty as well as the income distribution among the poor when applying this to a panel dataset from a community managed microfinance intervention in northern malawi we find regressive targeting participants are less poor than the general population in the area in addition we provide suggestions as to when and why the poor exit the project

target firm abnormal returns and trading volume around the initiation of change in control transactions this study examines the average abnormal returns average abnormal trading volume and reported insider trading of corporate control target firms during a period of possibly informed trading this period begins on the unpublicized initiation date as reported in a postannouncement date proxy statement or 14 d1 and ends on the publication date of the first wall street journal story signalling an impending change in corporate control we find that the preannouncement date average abnormal return noted by other researchers begins after the unpublicized initiation date of the transaction we find no evidence of the preannouncement date average abnormal trading volume noted by previous researchers instead we find average abnormal volume beginning with the first public information regarding the transaction

why don t we see poverty convergence average living standards are converging among developing countries and faster growing economies see more progress against poverty yet we do not find poverty convergence countries starting with higher poverty rates do not see higher proportionate rates of poverty reduction the paper tries to explain why analysis of a new dataset suggests that at given mean consumption high initial poverty has an adverse effect on consumption growth and also makes growth less poverty reducing thus for many poor countries the growth advantage of starting out with a low mean is lost due to a high incidence of poverty jel d63 i31 i32 o15

measuring energy poverty focusing on what matters abstract the provision of modern energy services is recognised as a critical foundation for sustainable development and is central to the everyday lives of people effective policies to dramatically expand modern energy access need to be grounded in a robust information base metrics that can be used for comparative purposes and to track progress towards targets therefore represent an essential support tool this paper reviews the relevant literature and discusses the adequacy and applicability of existing instruments to measure energy poverty drawing on those insights it proposes a new composite index to measure energy poverty both the associated methodology and initial results for several african countries are discussed whereas most existing indicators and composite indices focus on assessing the access to energy or the degree of development related to energy our new index the multidimensional energy poverty index mepi focuses on the deprivation of access to modern energy services it captures both the incidence and intensity of energy poverty and provides a new tool to support policy making

finance and the sources of growth the authors evaluate whether the level of development in the banking sector exerts a causal impact on economic growth and its sources total factor productivity growth physical capital accumulation and private saving they use 1 a pure cross country instrumental variable estimator to extract the exogenous component of banking development and 2 a new panel technique that controls for country specific effects and endogeneity they find that banks do exert a large causal impact on total factor productivity growth which feeds through to overall gdp gross domestic product growth the long run links between banking development and both capital growth and private savings are more tenuous

can high inequality developing countries escape absolute poverty do the poor face the same prospects for escaping poverty in high inequality developing countries as in low inequality countries is it possible for inequality to be so great as to stifle prospects of reducing absolute poverty even when other initial conditions and policies are favorable to growth household survey data for developing countries suggest that initial distribution does affect how much the poor share in rising average incomes higher initial inequality tends to reduce growth s impact on absolute poverty by the same token higher inequality diminishes the adverse impact on the poor of general economic contraction combining this evidence with that from recent investigations of inequality s effect on growth the author finds that if inequality is high enough countries that would have very good growth prospects at low levels of inequality may see little or no overall growth and little progress in reducing poverty or even a worsening on both counts the data the author uses suggest that such cases do occur the precision with which key parameters have been estimated makes it difficult to say with confidence how common such cases are but they appear to be in the minority what appear to be the best available estimates suggest that about one fifth of the spells between surveys he analyzed were cases in which poverty was rising yet positive growth in the mean and hence falling poverty is predicted at zero inequality inequality can be high enough to result in rising poverty despite good underlying growth prospects

inequality among world citizens 1820 1992 this paper investigates the distribution of well being among world citizens during the last two centuries the estimates show that inequality of world distribution of income worsened from the beginning of the 19th century to world war ii and after that seems to have stabilized or to have grown more slowly in the early 19th century most inequality was due to differences within countries later it was due to differences between countries inequality in longevity also increased during the 19th century but then was reversed in the second half of the 20th century perhaps mitigating the failure of income inequality to improve in the last decades jel d31 f0 n0 o0

growth and poverty evidence for developing countries in the 1980s abstract measures of consumption poverty for a sample of developing countries in the 1980s respond elastically to changes in mean consumption although there is a high variance in poverty outcomes at a given rate of growth there is no sign of systematic effects of growth on inequality