demand for money in open economies abstract the demand for real cash balances deduced from an underlying portfolio model of the financial market is shown to depend upon domestic variables and foreign monetary developments the model is estimated using quarterly postwar data for canada germany uk and us there is clear evidence that demand for money is affected not only by changes in domestic variables such as permanent income domestic interest rate and price expectations but also by fluctuations in exchange rate expectations and foreign interest rates the conclusion that domestic monetary policy is fairly ineffective and domestic financial markets are highly vulnerable to changes in foreign financial and monetary developments need to be modified in light of the results presented in this paper

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

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

why farmers sometimes love risks evidence from india abstractusing a unique data set collected among farmers in india s semiarid tropics we document the surprising prevalence of risk taking behavior in the face of realistically framed high stakes gambles we hypothesize that this apparently anomalous behavior is due to a combination of credit constraints and nonconvexities in production in particular the high stakes nature of the gambles creates the potential for a farmer to undertake a productive investment that would normally be unaffordable and thereby move to a permanently higher level of income we show that the degree to which farmers are willing to accept risk in return for this opportunity appears to relate in an intuitive way to their current agricultural production technology as well as the demographic composition of their household

is global social welfare increasing a critical level enquiry abstract we assess whether global social welfare has improved in the last decades despite or because of the substantial increase in global population we use for this purpose a relatively unknown but simple and attractive social evaluation approach called critical level generalized utilitarianism clgu clgu posits that social welfare increases with population size if and only if the new lives come with a level of living standards higher than that of a critical level despite its attractiveness clgu poses a number of practical difficulties that may explain why the literature has left it largely unexplored we address these difficulties by developing new procedures for making partial clgu orderings the headline result is that we can robustly conclude that world welfare has increased between 1990 and 2005 if we judge that lives with per capita yearly consumption of more than 1 248 necessarily increase social welfare the same conclusion applies to sub saharan africa if and only if we are willing to make that same judgment for lives with any level of per capita yearly consumption above 147 otherwise some of the admissible clgu functions will judge the last two decades increase in global population size to have lowered global social welfare

money demand in open economies a currency substitution model for venezuela abstract this paper investigates the extent to which domestic money balances in venezuela are influenced by foreign exchange considerations to this end individuals are assumed to choose the levels of foreign and domestic money that minimize the borrowing costs associated with a given level of monetary services the solution to this optimization problem yields a closed form demand function for domestic money that allows for foreign exchange considerations this specification is estimated and the results point to an elasticity of currency substitution in excess of one conditioned on these estimates the paper estimates the risk premium for the period 1981 82 prior to the collapse of the exchange rate system in 1983

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

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

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

the black market exchange rate vs the official rate in testing ppp which rate fosters the adjustment process abstract in testing the purchasing power parity theory ppp researchers hardly pay attention to the speed with which the exchange rate adjusts to a change in relative prices in this paper we show that the speed of adjustment is faster when the black market exchange rate is used in testing the ppp as compared to the official exchange rate this could be another reason as to why central banks should unify the two rates

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

an exploration of the changes in the international comparison program s global economic landscape abstract the purchasing power parity ppp rates from the 2011 round of the international comparison program icp imply some dramatic revisions to price levels and real incomes across the world as compared to the prior 2005 round this has important implications for many cross country comparisons including measures of poverty and inequality without presuming that either round is better methodologically the paper tries to help the community of icp users better understand the economic factors underlying the estimated changes in price levels across countries differences in domestic inflation rates have played a role as expected two other factors are identified the excess sensitivity to changes in market exchange rates suggests that the ppps may put higher weight on internationally traded goods than do domestic deflators additionally faster growing countries have seen a steeper rise in their ppp relative to market exchange rates this can be explained by a tendency for wage increases in growing economies to lead to a higher price level together these factors account for over 70 of the variance in ppp changes even ignoring methodological changes however an independent downward drift in price levels is also evident concentrated in the icp s asia region a possible explanation lies in the asia region s greater success relative to other regions in removing urban bias in the price surveys

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

governance strategies and welfare effects vertical integration and contracts in the catfish sector in vietnam using an original dataset from the vietnamese catfish sector we study the impact of vertical coordination options on household welfare and the implications of different stages of vertical coordination for the success of the whole sector the welfare gain from contract farming and employment on processor owned estate farms is estimated using a maximum simulated likelihood estimator our results show positive welfare effects from participating in contract farming but not from employment on processor owned estate farms the results imply that contract farming presents opportunities for economic growth but additional effort is required to make the contracts more accessible to smallholders

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

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

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

on testing the scale sensitivity of poverty measures past tests of the sensitivity of aggregate poverty measures to changes in equivalence scales can be very sensitive to the arbitrary choice of the pivotal reference demographics it is recommended that future tests should use demographics typical of people living near the poverty line as their reference

growth still is good for the poor incomes in the poorest two quintiles on average increase at the same rate as overall average incomes this is because in a global dataset spanning 118 countries over the past four decades changes in the share of income of the poorest quintiles are generally small and uncorrelated with changes in average income the variation in changes in quintile shares is also small relative to the variation in growth in average incomes implying that the latter accounts for most of the variation in income growth in the poorest quintiles these findings hold across most regions and time periods and when conditioning on a variety of country level factors that may matter for growth and inequality changes this evidence confirms the central importance of economic growth for poverty reduction and illustrates the difficulty of identifying specific macroeconomic policies that are significantly associated with the relative growth rates of those in the poorest quintiles

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

lights camera income illuminating the national accounts household surveys debate gdp per capita and household survey means present conflicting pictures of the rate of economic development in emerging countries one of the areas in which the national accounts household surveys debate is key is the measurement of developing world poverty we propose a data driven method to assess the relative quality of gdp per capita and survey means by comparing them to the evolution of satellite recorded nighttime lights our main assumption which is robust to a variety of specification checks is that the measurement error in nighttime lights is unrelated to the measurement errors in either national accounts or survey means we obtain estimates of weights on national accounts and survey means in an optimal proxy for true income these weights are very large for national accounts and very modest for survey means we conclusively reject the null hypothesis that the optimal weight on surveys is greater than the optimal weight on national accounts and we generally fail to reject the null hypothesis that the optimal weight on surveys is zero additionally we provide evidence that national accounts are good indicators of desirable outcomes for the poor such as longer life expectancy better education and access to safe water and we show that surveys appear to perform worse in developing countries that are richer and that are growing faster therefore we interpret our results as providing support for estimates of world poverty that are based on national accounts jel code i32

do exchange rate changes have symmetric or asymmetric effects on the demand for money in turkey as a result of the research conducted by nobel laureate robert mundell 1963 most studies estimating the demand for money today do include the exchange rate in their specification to account for currency substitution previous studies that did this for the turkish demand for money assumed that exchange rate changes do have symmetric effects on the demand for money in turkey in this article we question this assumption by using the nonlinear ardl approach we show that indeed exchange rate changes do have short run and long run asymmetric effects on the m1 demand for money introducing nonlinearity also yields a stable money demand

the mdgs and exit time the case of the philippines this article evaluates whether the philippines will be able to halve the incidence of poverty between 1990 and 2015 using the concept of exit time and household level data we find that the philippines as a whole will not be able to comply with target 1 of the millennium development goals mdgs although 15 of its provinces will be able to do so these provinces are closer to manila characterized by higher per capita expenditure growth rates and had lower incidence of poverty in 1988 this suggests the importance of policies to mitigate the regional disparity in achieving the mdgs

agriculture reform and food crisis in syria impacts on poverty and inequality abstract the paper pursues a twofold objective from a methodological viewpoint it shows how to carry out an impacts evaluation of exogenous shocks on poverty and inequality in a context characterised by out of equilibrium poorly adjusting markets as it is the case in many developing countries using a social accounting matrix framework from an empirical viewpoint it provides an assessment of how the cereal price spikes of 2007 2008 and the global recession of 2008 2009 have impacted the welfare of syrian households and how did they compound with the on going agricultural sector liberalisation implemented by the government of syria since mid 1990s this will contribute to shed some lights on the economic background behind the spreading of unrest across the country over the last couple of years or so the results show that liberalisation impacts are very different and largely affected by the adopted budget closure rules while reforms aiming at reducing agricultural market distortions such as production subsidies and price support for strategic crops could generally have a positive effect on growth poverty and inequality the elimination of food security interventions such as food stamp schemes determines an adverse distributional impact against rural household and an increase of poverty the recent macroeconomic shocks food price crisis and the global recession determined a generalised poverty increase and showed an income distribution bias against rural households three fundamental policy implications can be drawn by this study first the liberalisation of agricultural sector shows a significant growth potential and is likely to determine positive effects on poverty through a generalised increase of incomes as well as public budget savings that could be used for pursuing other policy goals second in the short run there is a structural trade off between equity improvements and poverty alleviation the policy options that will more likely reduce absolute poverty show undesirable distributive biases both on overall inequality and on rural households vis a vis urban households third the reform should include a careful design of the use of budget savings mainly to address equity goals that are likely to be generated in the short run by liberalisation

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

economic policy uncertainty and demand for money in australia abstractthe demand for money has received a great deal of attention in the empirical literature this literature however has emphasized factors such as interest rate income inflation rate and e

measuring and understanding behavior welfare and poverty angus deaton delivered his prize lecture on tuesday 8 december 2015 at the aula magna stockholm university these are the lecture slides this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

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

growth elasticity of poverty direct estimates from recent data using recent poverty data for developing countries elasticity of 2 poverty headcount with respect to the growth of gross domestic product gdp per capita is directly calculated for the 1990s and the 2000s the global estimate is around 0 84 which is much smaller in absolute magnitude than what some highly influential studies have reported or used for the poverty dense south asia region the elasticity is of the order of 0 22 which is a dramatic contrast from the previous estimates for india where the number of poor people is by far the largest of any country and where the poverty rate is higher than even in sub saharan africa ssa the elasticity is of the order of 0 13 which is an even bigger contrast from earlier studies policymakers and researchers are urged to keep these estimates in mind while judging the likely effect of income growth on poverty and to discount poverty reduction claims based on higher elasticity estimates that have been reported or used in many influential studies i

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

an error correction approach to money demand the case of sudan abstract an empirical analysis of money demand behavior in sudan is presented based on the dynamic error correction model a theoretical basis for the model is offered which allows an explicit parameterized division of effects into long run influences short term adjustments and proportional equilibrium conditions we refute previous claims that income and price effects may be abnormally high in sudan in part by accounting for both foreign exchange and inflationary influences

growth inequality and social welfare cross country evidence social welfare functions that assign weights to individuals based on their income levels can be used to document the relative importance of growth and inequality changes for changes in social welfare in a large panel of industrial and developing countries over the past 40 years most of the cross country and over time variation in changes in social welfare is due to changes in average incomes in contrast the changes in inequality observed during this period are on average much smaller than changes in average incomes are uncorrelated with changes in average incomes and have contributed relatively little to changes in social welfare

german monetary unification and the stability of the german m3 money demand function abstract this paper employs quarterly data from the whole of germany to test the stability of m3 demand for money the methodology is based on an application of the cusum and cusumsq in the context of error correction modeling and cointegration the results reveal some instability in m3 money demand function

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

agricultural distortions in sub saharan africa trade and welfare indicators 1961 to 2004 for decades agricultural price and trade policies in sub saharan africa have hampered farmers contributions to economic growth and poverty reduction although there has been much policy reform over the past two decades the injections of agricultural development funding together with ongoing regional and global trade negotiations have brought distortionary policies under the spotlight once again a key question asked of those policies is how much are they still reducing national economic welfare and trade economy wide models are able to address that question but they are not available for many poor countries even where they are typically they apply to just one particular previous year and so are unable to provide trends in effects over time this paper provides a partial equilibrium alternative to economy wide modeling by drawing on a modification of so called trade restrictiveness indexes to provide theoretically precise indicators of the trade and welfare effects of agricultural policy distortions to producer and consumer prices over the past half century the authors generate time series of country level indexes as well as africa wide aggregates they also provide annual commodity market indexes for the region and a sense of the relative importance of the key policy instruments used

where do the poor live this paper argues that the distribution of global poverty has changed and that most of the world s poor no longer live in countries officially classified as low income countries lics it is estimated that the majority of the world s poor or up to a billion people live in middle income countries mics this pattern is largely as a result of the recent graduation into the mic category of a number of populous countries the paper discusses the trends in the distribution of global poverty and opens a wider discussion on the potential implications for aid and development cooperation

the renminbi and poor country growth 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 and finally 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

world welfare is rising estimation using nonparametric bounds on welfare measures abstract i take a new approach to measuring world inequality and welfare over time by constructing robust bounds for these series instead of imposing parametric assumptions to compute point estimates i derive sharp bounds on the atkinson inequality index that are valid for any underlying distribution of income conditional on given fractile shares and gini coefficients while the bounds are too wide to reject the hypothesis that world inequality may have risen i show that world welfare rose unambiguously between 1970 and 2006 this conclusion is valid for alternative methods of dealing with countries and years with missing surveys alternative survey harmonization procedures alternative gdp series or if the inequality surveys used systematically underreport the income of the very rich or suffer from nonresponse bias

the impact of food inflation on urban poverty and its monetary cost some back of the envelope calculations this paper uses a sample of 73 developing countries to estimate the change in the cost of alleviating urban poverty brought about by the recent increase in food prices this cost is approximated by the change in the poverty deficit that is the variation in financial resources required to eliminate poverty under perfect targeting the results show that for most countries the cost represents less than 0 1 percent of gross domestic product however in the most severely affected it may exceed 3 percent in all countries the change in the poverty deficit is mostly due to the negative real income effect of those households that were poor before the price shock while the cost attributable to new households falling into poverty is negligible thus in countries where transfer mechanisms with effective targeting already exist the most cost effective strategy would be to scale up such programs rather than designing tools to identify the new poor

cointegration tests of a long run relation between money demand and the effective exchange rate abstract for the period starting with the floating of the us dollar we find evidence that long run stationarity of the demand function for m2 but not m1 requires inclusion of the effective exchange rate these results lend some support to mckinnon s hypothesis that nonstationarity in the demand for money can be resolved by inclusion of the exchange rate jel f41 e41

exchange rate sensitivity of the demand for money in developing countries there is consensus among researches that under the present floating exchange rate system although developing countries peg their exchange rate to a major currency they cannot avoid fluctuation in their effective exchange rates as long as major currencies fluctuate against one another few authors have investigated the effects of changes in effective exchange rates of developing countries on their imports exports trade balance demand for international reserves inflation etc in this paper we try to inestigate the effects of effective exchange rates of developing countries on their demand for money previous authors who have estimated a money demand function inclusive of an exchange rate variable bilateral or effective have restricted themselves to industrial countries only by using quarterly data over the 1973 85 period it is shown that in most developing countries while the short run effcts of depreciation could be in either direction its long run effects are negative indicating that deprecia

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

the effects of risk and shocks on non farm enterprise development in rural ethiopia summary this paper assesses the impact of risk and shocks on non farm enterprise development in rural ethiopia using a matched household enterprise community dataset augmented with precipitation based measures of risk the likelihood of running a non farm firm and the returns to running such firms co vary with agricultural productivity shocks diversification into non farm activities thus provides limited protection against fluctuations in agricultural performance this may explain why ex ante risk has no impact on the likelihood of running a non farm firm it nonetheless hampers non farm enterprise development by repressing investment and inducing sorting into less capital intensive activities

exchange rate sensitivity of demand for money and effectiveness of fiscal and monetary policies one of the arguments between proponents and opponents of floating exchange rates centres around the relative effectiveness of fiscal and monetary policy while proponents of floating rates argue that monetary policy is more effective under floating rates its opponents contend that fiscal policy is more effective under fixed rates however economic theory suggests that there is room for both policies under both types of exchange rate system depending upon degree of sterlization concentrating on the floating rates mundell 1963 has argued that the relative effectiveness of monetary and fiscal policies would also depend upon sensitivity of money demand to exchange rate more precisely he has conjectured that the demand for money is likely to depend upon the exchange rate in addition to the interest rate and the level of income this would slightly reduce the effectiveness of a given change in the quantity of money and slightly increase the effectiveness of fiscal policy on income and employment under

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

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

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

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