disability and poverty in vietnam disability is significantly correlated with poverty in vietnam according to data from the 2006 vietnam household living standards survey especially when the extra costs of living with a disability are taken into account this disability poverty link is also associated with lower educational attainment an important factor in determining poverty and productive economic activity in general both for household based businesses and wage employment not taking into account these associations and the extra costs of disability will make some poor disabled people invisible in poverty statistics and impede efforts to reduce poverty

how important is the capacity of local governments for improvements in welfare evidence from decentralised uganda abstract decentralisation is often claimed to be effective for improvements in welfare and hence the reduction of poverty but empirical evidence is scarce this paper seeks to gain further insights into the relationship between decentralisation and welfare by investigating the role of local governments capacity for household consumption and school enrolment in uganda using household survey data it finds suggestive evidence that both household consumption and school enrolment are positively related with the level of capacity of district governments

modeling determinants of poverty in mauritania abstract this paper presents a brief descriptive summary of poverty in mauritania as revealed by household survey data for 1990 and then uses regression analysis to study the determinants of living standards and hence poverty the latter is conducted at the level of broadly defined socioeconomic groups using an econometric technique which also models the selection of households into socioeconomic groups household characteristics are used as explanatory variables including demographic education and sector specific variables by controlling for many factors multivariate analysis enables a clearer understanding of the nature and determinants of poverty than can be obtained from examination of summary poverty indices

an analysis of childhood malnutrition in rural india role of gender income and other household characteristics there are controversies regarding the role of individual and household characteristics in childhood nutritional status measured by anthropometric indicators using a nutrition index based on weight for age of children in rural india the paper re examines this issue ordered probit estimates of nutritional status suggest female literacy improves the nutritional status of boys at the cost of girls while higher per capita current income improves that of both boys and girls though the impact is higher for boys however effect of income is not robust when we use instruments of longer run income but more income and literacy give more ways to discriminate between boys and girls

on measuring child costs with applications to poor countries the theoretical basis for measuring child costs is discussed and detailed consideration is given to two straightforward procedures for calculation engel s food share method and rothbarth s adult good method each of these methods embodies different definitions of child costs so that the same empirical evidence can generate quite different estimates depending on the method used it is shown that true costs are generally overstated by engel s method and understated by rothbarth s procedure although the latter unlike the former can provide a sensible starting point for cost measurement our estimates from sri lankan and indonesian data suggest that children cost their parents about 30 40 percent of what they spend on themselves

education and technical efficiency in small farm production differences in technical efficiency are observed as differences in the physical output produced from a given bundle of physical inputs these differences are not considered in the traditional theory of the firm wherein the output resulting from a particular input bundle is specified as the maximum possible according to the latest technology presupposing technical efficiency the theory of the firm concentrates on allocative efficiency on the choice of the particular input bundle that maximizes profit given prices and the technically efficient production function the best utilization of any particular input combination according to henderson and quandt is a technical not an economic problem 1 economic theory notwithstanding empirical studies of production must take into account differences in the utilization of inputs since in the real world producers are not all equally efficient it is conceptually convenient to divide the output variation observed over a number of firms into two parts one that stems from variation in physical inputs and another that reflects differences in technical efficiency timmer has developed an approach by which to compare the technical efficiency of firms using linear programming he determines the function that relates physical inputs to output for the most efficient of a sample of firms in other words he finds the production surface that is the envelope of all the observation points he calls this function the technical frontier the relative tech

stabilisation policy targets and unemployment in imperfectly competitive economies this paper argues that the rate of equilibrium unemployment depends on the objectives of the central bank in a model where the central bank uses monetary policy to stabilise the economy we show that unemployment and inflation will be lower with an inflation target than with targets for output money or nominal gdp the intuition for this is that the elasticities of demand in both the product and the labour markets are greater when there is an inflation target we show that this leads to a lower mark up of price over marginal cost and makes wages more sensitive to unemployment

monetary policy and automatic stabilizers the role of progressive taxation we study the effects of progressive labor income taxation in an otherwise standard new keynesian nk model we show that progressive taxation i introduces a trade off between output and inflation stabilization and affects the slope of the phillips curve ii acts as automatic stabilizer changing the responses to technology shocks and demand shocks and iii alters the prescription for the optimal monetary policy the welfare gains from commitment decrease as labor income taxes become more progressive quantitatively the model reproduces the observed negative correlation between the volatility of output hours and inflation and the degree of progressivity of labor income taxation

non atomistic wage setters and monetary policy in a new keynesian framework this paper extends an otherwise standard new keynesian nk model to allow for the presence of large wage setters building on monetary models from an earlier generation i contribute to the nk literature by adding some new insight it is shown that once the presence of large wage setters is taken into account the degree of wage setting centralization and the aggressiveness of the central bank in stabilizing inflation jointly affect steady state employment because of this interaction the benefits associated with inflation stabilization increase in the centralization of the wage bargaining process

monopolistic competition and the effects of aggregate demand how important is monopolistic competition to an understanding of the effects of aggregate demand on output we ask the question at three levels can monopolistic competition by itself explain why aggregate demand movements affect output can it together with other imperfections generate effects of aggregate demand in a way that perfect competition cannot if so can it give an accurate account of the response of the economy to aggregate demand movements the answers are no yes and yes

the effects of male and female labor supply on commodity demands we examine the effects of male and female labor supply on household demands and present a simple and robust test for the separability of commodity demands from labor supply using data on individual households from six years of the uk fes we estimate a demand system for seven goods which includes hours and participation dummies as conditioning variables allowance is made for the possible endogeneity of these conditioning labor supply variables we find that separability is rejected furthermore we present evidence that ignoring the effects of labor supply leads to bias in the parameter estimates

strategic monetary policy with non atomistic wage setters monetary policy analyses usually assume an atomistic private sector thereby ignoring potential interactions between policy and wage setting decisions yet non atomistic wage setters are a key feature of several industrialized economies we study the economic consequence of non atomistic agents and show that this qualifies previous results on the effects and desirability of a conservative central banker in particular the central bank aversion to inflation may have a permanent effect on structural employment while no such effect emerges with atomistic agents

a non walrasian labor market in a monetary model of the business cycle abstract this paper investigates to what extent a new keynesian monetary model with the addition of a microfounded non walrasian labor market solely based on union bargaining is able to replicate key aspects of the business cycle the presence of a representative union offers an explanation for two features of the cycle first it generates an endogenous mechanism which produces persistent responses to both supply and demand shocks second labor unionization reduces the elasticity of marginal costs to output this leads to lower inflation volatility model simulations show that the unionized framework can better reproduce european business cycle data than can a model with a competitive labor market

what has happened to the urban population in cote d ivoire since the 1980s an analysis of monetary poverty and deprivation over 15 years of household data abstract this article investigates the evolution of urban poverty in its various dimensions in cote d ivoire since the 1980s the robustness of the results is checked using dominance criteria an econometric analysis of poverty complements the analysis the study shows that the dynamic of poverty in terms of existence conditions can significantly differ from that of monetary poverty as was the case in the 1980s monetary poverty increased strongly in the 1990s in spite of a return to sustained growth following the devaluation of the cfa franc poverty in terms of existence conditions rose less before the adjustment and even decreased afterward

prices and unit values in poverty measurement and tax reform analysis researchers often use unit values household expenditures on a commodity divided by the quantity purchased as proxies for market prices when calculating poverty lines and estimating consumer demand equations such proxies are often needed because community price surveys in developing economies are either absent or suffer quality problems however using unit values may result in biases due to measurement error and quality effects in a household survey experiment information on prices was obtained in three ways from unit values from a market price survey and from the opinions of householders who were shown pictures of items and asked to report the local price the three sets of price data are used to calculate poverty lines estimate price elasticities and analyze marginal tax reforms there are substantial biases when unit values are used as a proxy for market price even when sophisticated correction methods are applied performance was better for the price opinions of household members the results highlight the importance of price collection methods and the need to consider the wider costs of having potentially unreliable community level price data

natural disasters household welfare and resilience evidence from rural vietnam summary the study uses commune fixed effects regressions to estimate the effect of natural disasters on welfare and poverty of rural households in vietnam and subsequently examines household and community characteristics that can strengthen resilience of households to natural disasters we find that all the three disaster types considered in this study including storms floods and droughts have negative effects on household income and expenditure households in communes with higher mean expenditure and more equal expenditure distribution are more resilient to natural disasters access to micro credit internal remittances and social allowances can help households strengthen the resilience to natural disasters

monetary regimes and the co ordination of wage setting abstract a recent literature argues that a strict monetary regime may reduce equilibrium unemployment by disciplining wage setters as wage setters abstain from raising wages to avoid a monetary contraction however in this literature the wage setters are assumed not to co ordinate their wage setting the present paper argues that precisely because a strict monetary regime may discipline the unco ordinated wage setting thus lowering unemployment in the unco ordinated outcome it also reduces wage setters incentives to co ordinate it is shown that an accommodating monetary regime may reduce equilibrium unemployment via the strengthening of the wage setters incentives to co ordinate

investigating the determinants of household welfare in cote d ivoire to predict the effect of economic policies on household welfare one should first understand which characteristics of households and of the localities in which they live enable them to raise their welfare levels this paper outlines a simple procedure for investigating the determinants of household welfare and demonstrates its use with recent data from cote d ivoire despite the relative simplicity much information is obtained from its use on cross sectional survey data results specific to cote d ivoire include high low returns to education in urban rural areas high benefits from cocoa land relative to coffee land a significant impact on economic welfare from the availability of medical services and no apparent benefits from agricultural extension services

poverty in egypt modeling and policy simulations abstract poverty profiles are a useful way of summarizing information on the levels of poverty and the characteristics of the poor in a society but they are limited by the bivariate nature of their informational content using the 1997 egypt integrated household survey eihs this article estimates models of household consumption in the first stage and then predicts poverty rates corresponding to changes in potential policy variables the key results of the study point to the important instrumental role of education parental background land redistribution and access to health facilities in alleviating poverty in egypt

central bank independence centralization of wage bargaining inflation and unemployment theory and some evidence abstract this paper proposes a conceptual framework to investigate the effects of central bank independence of the degree of centralization of wage bargaining and of the interaction between those institutional variables on real wages unemployment and inflation in a framework in which unions are averse to inflation this aversion moderates union s wage demands as they attempt to induce the central bank to inflate at a lower rate an increase in the degree of centralization of wage bargaining a decrease in the number of unions triggers two opposite effects on real wages unemployment and inflation it reduces the substitutability between the labor of different unions and therefore the degree of effective competition between them this reduced competition effect raises real wages unemployment and inflation but the decrease in the number of unions also strengthens the moderating effect of inflationary fears on the real wage demands of each union this strategic effect lowers real wages unemployment and inflation for sufficiently inflation averse unions the interaction between those two effects produces a calmfors driffill type relation between real wages and centralization the paper analyzes the effects of central bank independence on the position and the shape of this relation as well as on inflation and unemployment the paper features two mechanisms one of which is novel through which monetary institutions have real effects the model implies that if there is a single union social welfare is maximized when the central bank attaches a zero weight to inflation but when the number of unions is larger than one this result is no longer true in general empirical evaluation of some of the theoretical implications using data from 19 developed economies is for the most part supportive of those implications

evaluating the effects of optimally distributed public programs child health and family planning interventions this paper develops and tests an optimizing model determining the distribution of family planning and health subsidies across heterogeneous households and assesses the biases in cross area estimates of the health effects of such subsidies due to public resource optimization the model incorporates both health externalities and the endogenous response of the size of the recipient population to program subsidies longitudinal data describing child health and publicly provided family planning and health programs in 20 barrios in laguna province in the philippines are used to estimate the effects of such programs on child health and the relationships between the distribution of the programs and preprogram health levels the impact of a program on a particular childs health status is viewed as dependent upon the childs length of exposure to the program a basic feature of the model is the presence of health externalities which is shown to be sufficient along with plausible features of household behavior to make selective subsidization of fertility control either alone or in combination with health investment subsidies pareto efficient the model suggests that subsidization of fertility control is likely to be pareto efficient in the presence of health or human capital externalities when human capital and family size are gross substitutes and or when any per child human capital subsidies may substitute for direct subsidies to health investment and an equalizing distribution of the subsidies the highest family planning subsidies to the lowest health recipient households is efficient when both health and family planning subsidies are used fertility control subsidies minimize the subsidy burden for donors and are highest when total subsidy expenditures per child are greatest

preliminary data error and monetary aggregate targeting preliminary monetary aggregate data are subject to subsequent revision because of errors from seasonal and nonseasonal sources that will only be known later this article examines the characteristics of these revision errors and analyzes their possible effect on monetary policy it is found that false signals in the sense that the preliminary m1 growth rate falls within the tolerance band set monthly by the federal open market committee while the final revised figure lies outside the tolerance limits or vice versa occur about two fifths of the time it is shown that this proportion can be halved by the adoption of improved seasonal adjustment procedures