Ð We use Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) to compare ``poverty'' at two or more points in time within and between African countries. Our welfare measure is an index resulting from a factor analysis of various household characteristics, durables, and household headsÕ education. An advantage of this measure is that for intertemporal and intraregional comparisons, we need not rely on suspect p...

This paper reassesses the nexus between female education, employment and fertility in Nigeria. The four Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) that have been conducted in the country (1990–2008) were analysed. Between 1990 and 2008, the educational status of women improved appreciably and the proportion of illiterate women in the country declined from 57.2 to 35.8 per cent. Multivariate analysis ...

Commonly available survey data for developing countries often do not include income or expenditure data. This data limitation puts severe constraints on standard poverty and inequality analyses. We provide a simple approach to simulate household income based on publicly available Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) and macroeconomic data. We illustrate our approach with DHS data for Bolivia, B...

Despite a growing literature documenting strong linkages between income and health, there remains little understanding of how economic factors shape disease outcomes in the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Using individual level data from nineteen sub-Saharan African countries, we show that negative income shocks can lead to substantial increases in HIV prevalence. We match data on individuals’ HIV status fr...