information advantage in cournot oligopoly abstract consider an oligopolistic industry where firms have access to the same technology but are asymmetrically informed about the environment even though it is commonplace to think that in this context superior information leads to higher profits we find that under cournot competition this is not generally the case it holds when firms technology exhibits constant returns to scale but it does not necessarily hold otherwise journal of economic literature classification numbers c72 d43 l13

tracking poverty over time in the absence of comparable consumption data following the endorsement by the international community of the millennium development goals mdg there has been an increasing demand for practical methods for steadily tracking poverty an economically intuitive and inexpensive methodology is explored for doing so in the absence of regular comparable data on household consumption the minimum data requirements for this methodology are the availability of a household budget survey and a series of surveys with a comparable set of asset data also contained in the budget survey this method is illustrated using a series of demographic and health surveys for kenya

methods of household consumption measurement through surveys experimental results from tanzania consumption expenditure has long been the preferred measure of household living standards however accurate measurement is a challenge and household expenditure surveys vary widely across many dimensions including the level of reporting the length of the reference period and the degree of commodity detail these variations occur both across countries and also over time within countries there is little current understanding of the implications of such changes for spatially and temporally consistent measurement of household consumption and poverty a field experiment in tanzania tests eight alternative methods to measure household consumption on a sample of 4 000 households there are significant differences between consumption reported by the benchmark personal diary and other diary and recall formats under reporting is particularly relevant in illiterate households and for urban respondents completing household diaries recall modules measure lower consumption than a personal diary with larger gaps among poorer households and households with more adult members variations in reporting accuracy by household characteristics are also discussed and differences in measured poverty as a result of survey design are explored the study concludes with recommendations for methods of survey based consumption measurement in low income countries

how fast did developing country poverty fall during the 1990s capabilities based tests of rival estimates abstract non nested hypothesis tests are used to rank eight widely used international per capita income and poverty measures with respect to how well they predict changes in capabilities lower child mortality higher enrollment rates better nutrition etc national accounts based generally out perform survey based growth and poverty estimates in these tests

a human development index by income groups summary one of the most frequent critiques of the hdi is that it does not take into account inequality within countries we suggest a methodology which allows to compute the three components and the overall hdi for quintiles of the income distribution this allows comparisons of the level in human development of the poor and non poor within and across countries an empirical illustration shows large discrepancies in human development within the countries especially in africa these discrepancies are lower the higher the hdi is but only weakly so inequality in income is generally higher than inequality in education and life expectancy

financial liberalization in sub saharan africa what do we know abstract beginning from the early 1980s countries in sub saharan africa embarked on financial liberalization policies with a view to reversing the ill effects of financial repression this paper provides a survey of financial liberalization in sub saharan african countries over the period 1980 to 2004 our review of empirical studies showed that financial liberalization has had diverse and contrasting effects on savings investment and economic growth most studies found a significant positive effect of financial liberalization on investment whereas its effect on savings has been largely insignificant the evidence on the effect on economic growth is inconclusive as different studies find contrasting results it is found that financial liberalization policies have not had the desired and expected results as both financial and macroeconomic variables have not improved following financial liberalization in these countries this calls for a rethinking of financial liberalization in sub saharan african countries it is important that financial liberalization is carried out in a stable macroeconomic environment in addition to this there should be a building and reform of institutions and the strengthening of prudential regulation following this financial liberalization can be embarked upon but it must be properly sequenced and not rushed

controlling for the underreporting of remittances empirical studies that use self reported data on remittances to measure the latter s impact on microeconomic incentives mostly ignore the potential errors associated with reporting measurement issues an econometric procedure to control for these errors is developed and applied to household level data from armenia we find evidence of systematic underreporting of remittances after controlling for this we find a strong negative impact of remittances on incentives to work

migration costs and observational returns to migration in the developing world recent studies find that observational returns to rural urban migration are near zero in three developing countries we revisit this result using panel tracking surveys from six countries finding higher returns on average we then interpret these returns in a multi region roy model with heterogeneity in migration costs in the model the observational return to migration confounds the urban premium and the individual benefits of migrants and is not directly informative about the welfare gain from lowering migration costs patterns of regional heterogeneity in returns and a comparison of experimental to observational returns are consistent with the model s predictions

measuring aggregate welfare in developing countries how well do national accounts and surveys agree in a data set for developing and transition economies the author finds that private consumption per capita based on national accounts deviates on average from mean household income or expenditure based on national sample surveys growth rates also differ systematically so that the ratio of the survey mean to the national accounts mean tends to fall over time but there are revealing exceptions to these general findings the aggregate difference in the levels is due more to income surveys than to expenditure surveys and there are strong regional effects for example the severe data problems in the transition economies of eastern europe and central asia means that there is negligible correlation in that region between growth rates from national accounts and those from household surveys

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

the influence of macroeconomic factors on personal income distribution in developing countries a parametric modelling approach this article examines the influence of macroeconomic factors on personal income distribution in developing countries using a parametric modelling approach the technique is based on the selection and estimation of a theoretical parametric model a dagum distribution which fits accurately to the empirical income distributions of the countries examined the parameters of the model specifically related to inequality are subsequently used as dependent variables in econometric models in order to examine the impact that certain macroeconomic variables gdp growth inflation employment and real interest rates have on inequality the results reveal that gdp growth employment rate and real interest rate are the macroeconomic factors with greater impact in shaping personal income distribution in developing countries

affluence and food a simple way to infer incomes accurate and timely measures of cross country real incomes are still a rarity as the share of expenditure devoted to food is readily available we use engel s law in reciprocal form to measure affluence analysis of real income data for over 100 countries indicates that this approach is viable to recognize the role of uncertainty in the analysis we present the results in the form of stochastic cross country income comparisons

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

estimating the scale and geography of global poverty now and in the future how much difference do method and assumptions make summary estimates of the historic and future scale and location or geography of global poverty by income expenditure have a long and contentious history in recent projections made on global poverty methods and assumptions vary so widely it is impossible to compare studies in a systematic way even on their estimates of current poverty in light of this we discuss the methodological issues arising and use a custom built model to provide a new consistent set of long run estimates of global poverty to show the impact of different methods and assumptions on the scale and location of global poverty

risk and insurance in village india comment the protection of poor households in high risk agrarian economies from shocks to their incomes has often been seen as a compelling motive for various forms of policy intervention including transfers of cash or food credit subsidies and public employment schemes for a survey see lipton and ravallion 1995 the desirability of such safety net policies clearly depends on how well pre existing risk sharing arrangements work while it is commonly thought that without effective policy intervention rural households are vulnerable to village wide shocks such as adverse prices or poor rains it is less clear to what extent risk sharing institutions within the village mitigate the effects of idiosyncratic income risk stemming for instance from ill health or localized crop damage 2 several recent papers have used household level data to implement tests of risk sharing that might inform such concerns 3 these tests are based on the proposition that with perfect risk sharing consumption at the household level should be insured against idiosyncratic risks and thus depend solely on the realization of the aggregate risk wilson 1968 diamond 1967 townsend 1994 tests this implication of perfect intra village risk sharing using longitudinal household data on consumptions and incomes for three villages in india he reports that the full insurance hypothesis provides a surprisingly good benchmark in that household consumptions co move and do not appear to be much influenced by contemporaneous own income our aim here is to examine the robustness of this potentially important finding we have two main concerns the first is that the specification townsend adopts potentially biases his test towards the null hypothesis of full insurance because it yields inconsistent estimates of the key test parameter under a plausible alternative we therefore estimate a different specification that generates consistent estimates under both the null and the alternative our second concern is that a particular form of measurement error in the consumption data townsend uses may have further biased his results toward the null hypothesis of full insurance to address this concern we use an instrumental variables procedure when we implement the test of consumption insurance with townsend s consumption data we also re estimate the test equations with a measure of consumption derived from the same underlying primary data by an alternate method finally townsend reports 1discussions with robert townsend stimulated our interest in this investigation the staff of the

poverty and growth in india over six decades we study the evolution of consumption poverty measures for post independence india including 20 years since extensive economic reforms began in 1991 progress against poverty was negligible until the mid 1970s after which a downward trend in poverty measures emerged the pace of poverty reduction accelerated in the post reform period despite rising inequality amidst faster growth a key finding is that the relationship to the pattern of growth changed greatly suggesting stronger intersectoral linkages with urban consumption growth benefiting both the rural and urban poor in contrast to the pre reform period growth in primary secondary and tertiary sector outputs yielded similar impacts on poverty

explaining the evolution of poverty the case of mozambique we provide a comprehensive approach for analyzing the evolution of poverty using mozambique as a case study bringing together data from disparate sources we develop a novel back casting framework that links a dynamic computable general equilibrium model to a micro simulation poverty module this framework provides a new approach to explaining and decomposing the evolution of poverty as well as to examining rigorously the coherence between poverty economic growth and inequality outcomes finally various simple but useful and rarely applied approaches to considering regional changes in poverty rates are presented copyright 2012 oxford university press

what can new survey data tell us about recent changes in distribution and poverty it has been claimed that in recent times the poor have lost ground both relatively and absolutely even when average levels of living have risen this article tests that claim using household surveys for 67 developing and transitional economies over 1981 94 it finds that changes in inequality and polarization were uncorrelated with changes in average living standards distribution improved as often as it worsened in growing economies and negative growth was often more detrimental to distribution than positive growth overall there was a small decrease in absolute poverty although with diverse experiences across regions and countries almost always poverty fell with growth in average living standards and rose with contraction

recovering comparable poverty estimates in cote d ivoire recent studies on cote d ivoire show a four fold increase in poverty rates between 1985 and 2008 however multiple revisions in the survey design questions the validity of the ivorian poverty trend in this paper we follow two simple steps to recover the comparable poverty trend first we construct a common consumption basket over time second we follow a two stage method of moments framework tarozzi 2007 to re estimate poverty headcounts on average the adjusted trend shows a two percentage point difference in poverty rates from 1985 to 2008 a number of robustness checks provide robust support to this revised poverty trend

exchange rates productivity poverty and inequality this article analyses differences in the wealth of nations by comparing ppp based cross country incomes from the penn world table with those derived from prevailing exchange rates using the balassa 1964 samuelson 1964 productivity bias framework we introduce the international poverty line and illustrate the implications for cross country income inequality we demonstrate that our results are not inconsistent with the previous literature when appropriately interpreted

global poverty estimates a sensitivity analysis summary current estimates of global poverty vary substantially across studies we undertake a sensitivity analysis to highlight the importance of methodological choices by measuring global poverty using different data sources parametric and nonparametric estimation methods and multiple poverty lines our results indicate that estimates of global poverty vary significantly when they are based alternately on data from household surveys versus national accounts but are relatively consistent across estimation methods the decline in poverty over the past decade is found to be robust across methodological choices