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

price indexes inequality and the measurement of world poverty i discuss the measurement of world poverty and inequality with particular attention to the role of purchasing power parity ppp price indexes from the international comparison project global inequality increased with the latest revision of the icp and this reduced the global poverty line relative to the us dollar the recent large increase of nearly half a billion poor people came from an inappropriate updating of the global poverty line not from the icp revisions even so ppp comparisons between widely different countries rest on weak theoretical and empirical foundations i argue for wider use of self reports from international monitoring surveys and for a global poverty line that is truly denominated in us dollars

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

who is against immigration a cross country investigation of individual attitudes toward immigrants abstract this paper empirically analyzes economic and noneconomic determinants of individual attitudes toward immigrants within and across countries the two survey data sets used covering a wide range of developed and developing countries make it possible to test for interactive effects between individual characteristics and country level attributes in particular theory predicts that the correlation between pro immigration attitudes and individual skill should be related to the skill composition of natives relative to immigrants in the destination country skilled individuals should favor immigration in countries where natives are more skilled than immigrants and oppose it otherwise results based on direct and indirect measures of the relative skill composition are consistent with these predictions noneconomic variables also are correlated with immigration attitudes but they don t alter significantly the labor market results

noxious facilities environmental damages and efficient randomized siting this paper considers the efficient siting of a noxious facility that causes environmental damages for example increased pollution in the host community the analysis shows that there can be multiple efficient locations without transfers and that an efficient location need not have the smallest wta or wtp in general there exist randomized outcomes that are ex ante efficient and that pareto dominate efficient outcomes the analysis also shows that a community s most preferred lottery never provides full insurance under some conditions lotteries with no host compensation are pareto superior to those with compensation

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

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

remedying education evidence from two randomized experiments in india this paper presents the results of a two year randomized evaluation of a large scale remedial education program conducted in mumbai and vadodara india the remedial education program hires young women from the community to teach basic literacy and numeracy skills to children who reach standard three or four without having mastered these competencies the program implemented by a ngo in collaboration with the government is extremely cheap it cost 5 dollars per child per year and is easily replicable it has been implemented in 20 indian cities and reached tens of thousands of children we find the program to be very effective on average it increased learning by 0 15 standard deviations in the first year and 0 25 in the second year the gains are the largest for children at the bottom of the distribution children in the bottom third gain 0 2 standard deviations in the first year and 0 32 in the second year in math they gain 0 51 standard deviation in the second year the results are similar in the two grade levels and in the two cities at the margin extending this program would be up to 12 16 times more cost effective than hiring new teachers authors

immigration quotas and skill upgrading a reason why immigration policy is such a contended issue is that often immigrants end up obtaining the right to vote and hence may affect future policies this paper offers a dynamic general equilibrium model of immigration policy in each period a heterogeneously skilled population chooses an immigration policy by majority vote voters anticipate that immigration affects the skill premium and the skill composition of the electorate the main insight is the existence of a trade off between skill complementary immigration and the resulting shift in political power i argue that a reasonably parameterized version of the model is consistent with the main features of us immigration

auctioning the provision of an indivisible public good abstract a community of n agents must determine which of its members should provide an indivisible public good each of the agents can provide the public good but the provision cost varies among the agents we identify here an efficient solution concept for such problems and design a class of auction like mechanisms each of which nash implements and under appropriate domain restrictions fully nash implements this the mechanisms are in the spirit of k th lowest bidder auctions journal of economic literature classification numbers c72 d44 h41

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

a systematic review of the bottom base of the pyramid literature cumulative evidence and future directions sixteen years ago prahalad and hart strategy business 26 2 14 2002 introduced the possibility of both profitably serving the poor and alleviating poverty this first iteration of the bottom base of the pyramid approach known as bop 1 0 focused on selling to the poor in 2008 after ethical criticisms leveled at it the field moved to bop 2 0 instead emphasizing business co venturing since 2015 we have witnessed some calls for a new iteration bop 3 0 with the focus broadening to a more sustainable development approach to poverty alleviation in this paper we seek to answer the question how has the bop approach evolved over the past 16 years and has it delivered on its early promise we conducted a systematic review of 276 papers published in journals in this period utilizing a rigorous correspondence analysis method to map key trends and then further examined the 22 empirical studies conducted on the bop approach our results suggest that the field has evolved passing through a number of trends and coming full circle with our analysis pointing to more recent bop literature emphasizing similar themes to those espoused in the initial bop iteration i e treating the bop as consumers rather than reflecting the principles espoused in either bop 2 0 or bop 3 0 our analysis also points to a lack of clear evidence that the bop concept has delivered on its promise either to businesses that they can serve bop markets profitably or to bop participants that involvement by multinational corporations will help alleviate poverty

targeting the poor evidence from a field experiment in indonesia the brief summarizes the targeting the poor evidence from a field experiment in indonesia for the period december 2008 january 2009 this paper reports an experiment in 640 indonesian villages on three approaches to target the poor proxy means tests pmt where assets are used to predict consumption community targeting where villagers rank everyone from richest to poorest and a hybrid defining poverty based on ppp 2 per capita consumption community targeting and the hybrid perform somewhat worse in identifying the poor than pmt though not by enough to significantly affect poverty outcomes for a typical program elite capture does not explain these results instead communities appear to apply a different concept of poverty

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

the impact of ethnic diversity on microenterprise start ups until recently factors determining the decisions made by microfinance institutions mfis to extend loans to business start ups had not been explored recent evidence shows that mfi performance wi

individual attitudes towards skilled migration an empirical analysis across countries it is commonly argued that skilled immigration benefits the destination country through several channels yet only a limited number of countries report having policies in place aimed at increasing the intake of skilled immigrants why in this paper we analyse the factors that affect a direct measure of individual attitudes towards skilled migration we focus on two main channels the labour market and the welfare state we find that more educated natives are less likely to favour skilled immigration consistent with the labour market channel while richer people are more likely to do so in accordance with the welfare state channel under the tax adjustment model our findings thus suggest that the labour market competition threat perceived by skilled natives in the host countries might be driving the observed cautious policies

does the welfare state affect individual attitudes toward immigrants evidence across countries abstract this paper analyzes welfare state determinants of individual attitudes toward immigrants within and across countries and their interaction with labor market drivers of preferences we consider two mechanisms through which a redistributive welfare system might adjust as a result of immigration under the first model immigration has a larger impact on high income individuals while under the second one low income individuals are those most affected individual attitudes are consistent with the first welfare state model and with labor market determinants in countries where immigration is unskilled income is negatively correlated with pro immigration preferences while skill is positively correlated with them these relationships are reversed in economies characterized by skilled migration

the effect of entrepreneurial rhetoric on microlending investment an examination of the warm glow effect microlending provides a valuable alternative to traditional financing for entrepreneurs in impoverished countries drawing from theory on political rhetoric and the concept of warm glow giving we examine characteristics of entrepreneurial narratives that are related to how quickly entrepreneurs receive funding using a sample of 6051 narratives from entrepreneurs in developing countries we demonstrate that narratives higher in language indicating blame and present concern lead to more rapid funding while narratives higher in accomplishment tenacity and variety lead to slower funding our findings suggest that the presentation of investment profiles should be carefully managed to maximize funding likelihood

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

when institutional change outruns the change agent the contested terrain of entrepreneurial microfinance for those in poverty we argue that institutional change moves through stages punctuated by recurring attempts to formally redefine the boundaries and logics of organizational fields that institutional entrepreneurs initially establish with a grounded theory model we demonstrate that institutional change in microfinance started with dominant development logic shifted to market logic and got stuck in a conflict over regulatory logic we show how the role of the entrepreneur can change markedly over time while the institutional change process continues unabated we present institutional entrepreneurship as an evolving phenomenon and suggest that the interplay between institutional entrepreneurs and established organizational fields is highly nuanced

micro entrepreneurship and subjective well being evidence from rural bangladesh abstract microcredit has long been hailed as a powerful tool to promote livelihoods and reduce poverty through entrepreneurship however its impacts on people s subjective well being remain underexplored we present a unified theoretical framework for analyzing the effect of microcredit enabled entrepreneurship on overall life satisfaction a key manifestation of subjective well being empirically we apply an instrumental variable approach to a unique census like household survey conducted in three villages of bangladesh in 2013 in spite of having no direct effects we find that microcredit borrowing has an indirect negative effect on overall life satisfaction through increased worry on a positive note we find that female micro borrowers experience an increase in satisfaction with financial security and achievement in life we also provide evidence that micro borrowers with higher levels of assets experience an increase in satisfaction with financial security

is microcredit a blessing for the poor a meta analysis examining development outcomes and contextual considerations abstract increasing efforts aim at economic development and the reduction of poverty in developing countries through microcredit enabled entrepreneurship following the award of the nobel peace prize to prof yunus microcredit lending has risen to prominence and the volume of microcredit loans has increased substantially however theory on the outcomes of this financing form is controversial furthermore the academic community lacks conclusive empirical evidence about the impact of such programs primary empirical studies report fragmented and to a large extent contradictory results in this meta analysis we empirically synthesize a total of 545 quantitative empirical findings from 90 studies conducted to date our findings reveal a positive impact of microcredit on key development outcomes at the level of the client entrepreneurs additionally we scrutinize how the development context influences the effectiveness of microcredit and find that microcredit generally has a greater impact in more challenging contexts with our findings we contribute to research on the nexus of entrepreneurship and economic development and offer recommendations for practitioners and academics working on this promising frontier

bric by bric the role of the family household in sustaining a venture in impoverished indian slums we advance understanding of the embedded role of the family household in governing firm performance in an impoverished setting drawing on bricolage theory which articulates how individuals make do with resources at hand we suggest that family household diversity facilitates creativity while family household shared business experience facilitates routinization while initially performance enhancing unfettered creativity and overroutinization have detrimental effects and thus expect the highest levels of performance to occur at moderate levels of family household diversity and shared business experience we find general support for our hypotheses using a large sample of firms and families in impoverished indian households

belief in a just world and redistributive politics international surveys reveal wide differences between the views held in different countries concerning the causes of wealth or poverty and the extent to which people are responsible for their own fate at the same time social ethnographies and experiments by psychologists demonstrate individuals recurrent struggle with cognitive dissonance as they seek to maintain and pass on to their children a view of the world where effort ultimately pays off and everyone gets their just deserts this paper offers a model that helps explain i why most people feel such a need to believe in a just world ii why this need and therefore the prevalence of the belief varies considerably across countries iii the implications of this phenomenon for international differences in political ideology levels of redistribution labor supply aggregate income and popular perceptions of the poor the model shows in particular how complementarities arise endogenously between individuals desired beliefs or ideological choices resulting in two equilibria a first american equilibrium is characterized by a high prevalence of just world beliefs among the population and relatively laissez faire policies the other european equilibrium is characterized by more pessimism about the role of effort in economic outcomes and a more extensive welfare state more generally the paper develops a theory of collective beliefs and motivated cognitions including those concerning money consumption and happiness as well as religion

information and strategyproofness in joint project selection abstract we introduce the following multi activity public goods problem with excludables a group of agents with limited budgets is to select a subset of new technologies to be developed each technology has a known cost and may provide different returns which are private information to the agents agents coordinate their activities through a central administrator once purchased technologies are used freely by all contributors through examining information provided to the agents and the administrator we create a bounded rationality environment and provide a strategyproof selection and cost allocation mechanism under a particular decision criterion

doctors with borders occupational licensing as an implicit barrier to high skill migration research on the political economy of immigration overlooks the specificity of human capital in skilled occupations and its implications for immigration preferences and policymaking conclusions that skilled americans are unconcerned about labor market competition from skilled migrants build on a simple dichotomy between high and low skill migrants in this article we show that natives turn to occupational licensing regulations as occupation specific protectionist barriers to skilled migrant labor competition in practice high skill natives face labor market competition only from those high skill migrants who share their occupation specific skills licensure regulations ostensibly serve the public interest by certifying competence but they can simultaneously be formidable barriers to entry by skilled migrants from a collective action perspective skilled natives can more easily secure sub national occupation specific policies than influence national immigration policy we exploit the unique structure of the american medical profession that allows us to distinguish between public interest and protectionist motives for migrant physician licensure regulations we show that over the 1973 2010 period states with greater physician control over licensure requirements imposed more stringent requirements for migrant physician licensure and as a consequence received fewer new migrant physicians by our estimates over a third of all us states could reduce their physician shortages by at least 10 percent within 5 years just by equalizing migrant and native licensure requirements this article advances research on the political economy of immigration and highlights an overlooked dimension of international economic integration regulatory rent seeking as a barrier to the cross national mobility of human capital and the public policy implications of such barriers

educated preferences explaining attitudes toward immigration in europe recent studies of individual attitudes toward immigration emphasize concerns about labor market competition as a potent source of anti immigrant senti ment in particular among less educated or less skilled citizens who fear being forced to compete for jobs with low skilled immigrants willing to work for much lower wages we examine new data on attitudes toward immigration available from the 2003 european social survey in contrast to predictions based on conventional argu ments about labor market competition which anticipate that individuals will oppose immigration of workers with similar skills to their own but support immigration of workers with different skill levels we find that people with higher levels of educa tion and occupational skills are more likely to favor immigration regardless of the skill attributes of the immigrants in question across europe higher education and higher skills mean more support for all types of immigrants these relationships are almost identical among individuals in the labor force that is those competing for jobs and those not in the labor force contrary to the conventional wisdom then the connection between the education or skill levels of individuals and views about immigration appears to have very little if anything to do with fears about labor market competition this finding is consistent with extensive economic research show ing that the income and employment effects of immigration in european economies are actually very small we find that a large component of the link between educa tion and attitudes toward immigrants is driven by differences among individuals in cultural values and beliefs more educated respondents are significantly less racist and place greater value on cultural diversity than do their counterparts they are also more likely to believe that immigration generates benefits for the host economy as a whole

bankers at the gate microfinance and the high cost of borrowed logics in this paper we examine how the interaction between influences of commercial banking and poverty alleviation shaped the evolution of modern microfinance using institutional theory as a lens we observe that the commercial banking logic increasingly displaced the microfinance field s foundational poverty alleviation and development principles over time we argue that this process of displacement can occur inadvertently as organizations that embody multiple logics draw disproportionately on only one of those logics when developing legitimating accounts of their activity to stakeholders furthermore we introduce the concept of permeability the extent to which the elements of a logic are ambiguous and loosely coupled to explain why some logics may be more or less open to the influence of other logics we conclude by discussing implications for entrepreneurship and poverty alleviation more generally

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

children s resources in collective households identification estimation and an application to child poverty in malawi children s resources matter but they are hard to identify because consumption is typically mea sured at the household level modern collective household models permit some identication of indi vidual household member resources but these models typically either ignore children or treat them as attributes of adults we propose a collective household model in which children are people with their own utility functions possibly assigned to them by parents extending the frameworks of browning chiappori and lewbel 2007 and lewbel and pendakur 2008 we show identication of children s resource shares within households we invoke semiparametric restrictions on individual preferences and use data on the household level consumption of assignable private goods to achieve identication of each individual s resource share within the household we show this without being able to observe consumption by individual household members of goods that are partly or wholly shared goods within the household further we obtain identication using only engel curves and so do not require ob served price variation in the data we estimate our model using data from malawi andnd that as the number of children in a household grows women s resource shares fall and children s resource shares rise and men s resource shares are basically unchanged we alsond evidence of gender bias against girls and observe that the resource shares of mothers and children are increasing in the education level of the mother finally we use our estimates to construct poverty indices at the person level andnd that per capita poverty indices understate the incidence of child poverty in malawi

the effect of low skilled immigration on u s prices evidence from cpi data i exploit the large variation across u s cities and through time in the relative size of the low skilled immigrant population to estimate the causal effect of immigration on prices of nontraded goods and services using an instrumental variables strategy i find that at current immigration levels a 10 percent increase in the share of low skilled immigrants in the labor force decreases the price of immigrant intensive services such as housekeeping and gardening by 2 percent wage equations suggest that lower wages are a likely channel through which these effects take place however wage effects are significantly larger for low skilled immigrants than for low skilled natives implying that the two are imperfect substitutes

an assessment of four popular auction mechanisms in the siting of nimby facilities some experimental evidence the issue of locating locally unfriendly but socially beneficial facilities such as landfills and power stations is an important public policy concern in many countries local residents in the area where such facilities are to be located tend to exhibit strong opposition no doubt due to the asymmetric distribution of the costs and benefits of such not in my backyard nimby facilities a potentially useful mechanism for the siting of such facilities is by compensation auctions which attempt to incorporate the market mechanism into the decision making process in such auctions communities name the compensation they require to host such facilities and the community demanding the least amount of compensation gets to host the facility this research attempts to evaluate the performance of such compensation auctions using laboratory exepriments four popular auction formats are evaluated first and second price and all pay first and second price sealed bid auctions the latter two formats correspond to th

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

entrepreneurship in and around institutional voids a case study from bangladesh abstract in many developing countries those living in poverty are unable to participate in markets due to the weakness or complete absence of supportive institutions this study examines in microcosm such institutional voids and illustrates the activities of an entrepreneurial actor in rural bangladesh aimed at addressing them the findings enable us to better understand why institutional voids originate and to unpack institutional processes in a setting characterized by extreme resource constraints and an institutional fabric that is rich but often at odds with market development we depict the crafting of new institutional arrangements as an ongoing process of bricolage and unveil its political nature as well as its potentially negative consequences

poverty and the varieties of entrepreneurship in the pursuit of prosperity abstract in this paper we revisit the entrepreneurship and poverty relationship under a eudaimonic perspective that brings together conversion factors and future prosperity expectations based on an fsqca of changes in life circumstances of 166 farm households in rural kenya we explore how different combinations of conversion factors enable distinct forms of entrepreneuring in the pursuit of prosperity results show that strong entrepreneurship enabled future prosperity expectations result from three combinations of enabling conversion factors shaping up three varieties of entrepreneurial endeavors family frugal individual market and family inwards which show a much more diverse and counterintuitive reality our research contributes to literature by revealing and theorizing on a split picture portraying the many ways in which farmers acting as everyday entrepreneurs exploit real opportunities in seemingly identical impoverished communities it also reveals a central disconnect between entrepreneurship life satisfaction and financial improvements when assessed against expectations of future prosperity in doing so this paper responds to calls for a better understanding of the processes whereby entrepreneurship can distinctively improve current and future life circumstances and the many ways in which this may happen

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 global economic crisis and the effect of immigrant workers on native born employment in europe the debate regarding the economic effects of employing immigrants has attracted renewed interest in european countries since the economic crisis we provide an approximation of the labour market effects of immigrant workers in four european countries during the global economic crisis after briefly analysing native and foreign born worker conditions for the most recent period our analysis focuses on the correlation between the stock of immigrant workers and the number of native labour market workers across several segments of the labour market using a simple model approach using eurostat and lfs labour force survey data we estimate a structural dynamic model using the generalised method of moments gmm to examine adjustment dynamics in the labour market and labour market segment and worker educational levels countries of origin and genders overall the empirical results suggest that immigrant labour force effects on native born worker employment rates have been persistent and but weak throughout the business cycle these effects are globally positive and immigrant origins do not appear to change the nature of their impact we offer some explanations for these findings related to dual labour markets and to differences in levels of substitution among native and immigrant workers

wish you were here quasi experimental evidence on the effect of education on self reported attitude toward immigrants abstract we use european social survey and labour force survey data from 2002 to 2012 to estimate the causal effect of years of education on european natives opinion toward immigration by exploiting the exogenous discontinuity generated by reforms in compulsory education in europe in the 1940s through the 1990s our findings show that higher levels of education lead to a more positive reported attitude toward immigrants we also investigate the mechanisms behind the effect of education on reported attitudes by evaluating both economic and non economic channels we find that higher levels of education place individuals in occupations that are less exposed to the negative effects of migration although not in sectors occupations where the share of migrants is necessarily smaller suggesting that migrants and low educated natives may be complementary rather than substitutes in the labour market in addition education alters values and the cognitive assessment of the role of immigration in host societies with a positive effect on reported attitude toward diversity and on the assessment of immigration s role in host countries our findings suggest that education as a policy instrument can increase social cohesion in societies that are subject to large immigration flows

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

giffen behavior and subsistence consumption this paper provides the first real world evidence of giffen behavior i e upward sloping demand subsidizing the prices of dietary staples for extremely poor households in two provinces of china we find strong evidence of giffen behavior for rice in hunan and weaker evidence for wheat in gansu the data provide new insight into the consumption behavior of the poor who act as though maximizing utility subject to subsistence concerns we find that their elasticity of demand depends significantly and nonlinearly on the severity of their poverty understanding this heterogeneity is important for the effective design of welfare programs for the poor jel d12 012

tying odysseus to the mast evidence from a commitment savings product in the philippines we designed a commitment savings product for a philippine bank and implemented it using a randomized control methodology the savings product was intended for individuals who want to commit now to restrict access to their savings and who were sophisticated enough to engage in such a mechanism we conducted a baseline survey on 1777 existing or former clients of a bank one month later we offered the commitment product to a randomly chosen subset of 710 clients 202 28 4 percent accepted the offer and opened the account in the baseline survey we asked hypothetical time discounting questions women who exhibited a lower discount rate for future relative to current trade offs and hence potentially have a preference for commitment were indeed significantly more likely to open the commitment savings account after twelve months average savings balances increased by 81 percentage points for those clients assigned to the treatment group relative to those assigned to the control group we conclude that the savings response represents a lasting change in savings and not merely a short term response to a new product

microlending in emerging economies building a new line of inquiry from the ground up the world s poor may be the last great frontier in international business international microlenders are increasingly tapping into this emerging opportunity by extending small business loans to millions of borrowers however to date there is very limited understanding of this domain from an international business perspective using qualitative case studies developed in guatemala and the dominican republic we probe the causes and consequences of high performance and business failure for microloan recipients the analysis of these cases led to the development of six testable propositions focused on the behavior of borrowers whose loans populate the portfolios of international microlenders our research aims to lay a foundation in international business for future research on microlending

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

attitudes toward highly skilled and low skilled immigration evidence from a survey experiment past research has emphasized two critical economic concerns that appear to generate anti immigrant sentiment among native citizens concerns about labor market competition and concerns about the fiscal burden on public services we provide direct tests of both models of attitude formation using an original survey experiment embedded in a nationwide u s survey the labor market competition model predicts that natives will be most opposed to immigrants who have skill levels similar to their own we find instead that both low skilled and highly skilled natives strongly prefer highly skilled immigrants over low skilled immigrants and this preference is not decreasing in natives skill levels the fiscal burden model anticipates that rich natives oppose low skilled immigration more than poor natives and that this gap is larger in states with greater fiscal exposure in terms of immigrant access to public services we find instead that rich and poor natives are equally opposed to low skilled immigration in general in states with high fiscal exposure poor rich natives are more less opposed to low skilled immigration than they are elsewhere this indicates that concerns among poor natives about constraints on welfare benefits as a result of immigration are more relevant than concerns among the rich about increased taxes overall the results suggest that economic self interest at least as currently theorized does not explain voter attitudes toward immigration the results are consistent with alternative arguments emphasizing noneconomic concerns associated with ethnocentrism or sociotropic considerations about how the local economy as a whole may be affected by immigration

bidding for a group specific public good prize abstract we examine the equilibrium effort levels of individual players and groups in a contest in which two groups compete with each other to win a group specific public good prize the players choose their effort levels simultaneously and independently and the winning group is determined by the selection rule of all pay auctions we first prove nonexistence of a pure strategy nash equilibrium and then construct a mixed strategy nash equilibrium at the nash equilibrium the only active player in each group is a player whose valuation for the prize is the highest in that group all the other players expend zero effort and the equilibrium effort levels depend solely on two values the highest valuation for the prize in each group

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

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